


The Rippers

by Langwidere (nimmieamee)



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2018-09-21 00:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 117,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9522374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Langwidere
Summary: Seven months after Ultimecia, Rinoa, Irvine, and Selphie become enmeshed in magical double-dealings in Deling City. Meanwhile Squall, Zell, and Quistis find themselves on a faintly ludicrous assignment for former headmaster Cid. As the questions pile up in both cases, the only answers seem to lie in ancient heroes, children's stories, and their old enemy: Seifer Almasy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first half or so of this was originally posted [here](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10503194/1/The-Nether-Rippers), where most of the FF8 fans still seem to be hanging out, but tbh I can't handle that site's posting system anymore. So the fic is getting a new home on ao3. Hope you enjoy!

March 20th, some time after the war with Adel.

The children of the orphanage were going to have a story. And it wasn’t going to be like one of those nice stories Matron always told. Her stories were: Yuffie Learns To Share or Celes Goes to the Theatre or Edward, Please Stop Singing. They would invariably have a moral at the end, if you even made it to the end. The children never did. Matron's stories were meant to make you go to sleep. And nothing really bad would ever happen in them. There was no point trying to stay up and catch a surprise, because in Matron's stories you wouldn't get one. There would be no monsters or dark twists or double-crosses to speak of.

Matron's stories were dull. Matron, not having a cruel bone in her body, was a terrible storyteller. The only person who really liked her stories was Zell, though everyone liked Matron, so the only person to ever come out with it and tell her that her stories were bad was Seifer.

But today they would have a better story. Cid was here.

Cid didn't _look_ very interesting. He was fat and craggy-faced, not handsome at all. And he claimed that he owned a gunblade, but you never saw it. Matron had forbidden him from showing it to the children of the orphanage.

So the only interesting thing about Cid was that he told the best stories. Cid could summon up horrible stories, stories that left you wide awake all night, stories that left you shouting: stop! Don’t say anymore! But also: why are you stopping? Keep going! We have to know what happens next!

Maybe Cid didn't mean to plunge the children into delicious turmoil. But he always managed to. He was a kind, generous person otherwise, overflowing with gifts every time he visited. This time he brought a camera for Matron.

“Hey, are we all gonna have to pose for a picture?” said Seifer.

“I hope not,” muttered Squall, into the crook of Ellone’s arm. But they did have to. Matron made them.

Cid also brought a sparkly barrette for Selphie and for Irvine, a Cactus Jack in-a-box all the way from Deling City. Irvine and Selphie agreed to share their gifts because Selphie really wanted the Cactus Jack, so Irvine wore the barrette rakishly behind one ear for a week, after which it was lost and they had no choice but to share the Jack. 

“Cid, you know they’re just gonna break it, right?” said Seifer.

“Selphie’s crazy crazy crazy,” Squall agreed, but relayed this information to no living person directly, just to the colony of spiders that lived in the wall next to the fridge.

Then Cid produced a smiling plush chocobo for Zell. It rattled and shook and buzzed and lit up the boys’ room like a nightlight when its stomach was squeezed.

“Good, he needs baby toys,” Seifer said dismissively.

“It even looks like Zell,” Squall told the stove.

Seifer heard this and agreed. Loudly and for the next fourteen years.

To Quistis, Cid gave a child's complete tool box. It was the envy of the orphanage for the next month. It had everything – a play hammer, play nails, play saw, play wrench, play spackle that was really just a kind of play dough.

“She’s so boring, Cid. Why’d you give that to her? She’s just gonna keep everything in the box and not let anybody else touch it,” Seifer complained.

“We can steal the pieces and use them for weapons,” Squall informed the window.

And that was exactly what happened.

Ellone had a porcelain doll in fancy old Dolletian dress. It had tiny be-ribboned shoes and a mirror, and a purse, and a beautiful scarlet overcoat, and a own porcelain male companion in knight’s garb, and an old-fashioned sorceress staff for summoning eldritch creatures of Hyne from the deep to destroy her enemies.

Seifer said nothing at first. He was impressed in spite of himself. Then, after a minute, he said to no one in particular: Is that even _allowed_ to give to a kid?”

“You should put it away where we won’t break it,” Squall told Ellone.

Last came Squall and Seifer’s gifts. Cid made a big production of it; these two children were clearly his favorites. Good, sweet Matron loved and liked them all in equal measure. But Cid simply loved them equally; he _liked_ best the two that always came running (slowly trailing, in Squall’s case) up to him every time he visited. They were less adoptable than the rest. Everybody knew this. Squall was an introverted slip of a thing that crept along addressing not other human beings, but more often the moon at night, or the grains of sand on the beach, or the blades of grass in the courtyard. He drifted behind Ellone like he existed on some other plane, calm and quiet, voicing only one thought for every fifty he actually had. He made people nervous.

And Seifer was just too loud. Fussy. Childish even for a child. Not to mention impulsive, stubborn, and occasionally nasty enough to convince people that he just had a natural gift for being nasty.

But Cid adored them both.

“You won’t believe what I’ve brought for you two,” he said, lifting up his hands excitedly. “Now—“

“It's not gonna be gunblades,” Squall told the floorboards presciently. “It's never gunblades.”

“Right?” said Seifer.

Cid heard this exchange. He paused. He said, "Er.”

“Probably gonna be something dumb like a train set,” Seifer told Squall.

“Choo, choo, no thanks,” Squall told the curtains.

“And then it’ll just end up in Selphie’s hands,” Seifer complained. “Am I right, Squall?”

“Selphie’s a jail,” Squall said to his own shoes. “For all the toys she breaks. That we can’t ever play with again.”

“Um,” Cid said. “It’s a _gift_ , boys. Don’t you at least want a gift?”

“Not if it’s not gunblades,” said Seifer. “We’ve had this talk, Cid.”

“Prison guard Irvy,” Squall said glumly, still stuck on the vision of what would happen to the train set. “Traps all the toys in Her hands.” He addressed these thoughts to the clock on the wall.

“Tell you what,” Seifer said, “Give us a story.”

“Call it even,” Squall offered, making the offer very clear to Cid’s shins.

“I dunno about _even_ ,” said Seifer, a natural at the thuggish shakedown. “Call it about… half even. You still owe us at least one gunblade.”

“When did I ever promise two gunblades?” Cid said, thrown off. “You both know Matron won’t let me bring even one gunblade—“

“Better be a good story,” said Squall, ignoring Cid entirely and focusing instead on the fireplace poker.

“The Underworld rippers!” said Seifer.

“ _The rippers_ ,” said Squall.

They knew they could break him down if they worked together. They could force him into telling the worst, the best, the most awful, the most wonderful story of all. _The Rippers_.

But the other children, with preferences of their own, could throw off their excellent union, their terrible alliance. Zell, in particular, was no fan of Cid’s stories. He’d been standing by the door, halfway in the kitchen, halfway in the playroom, and when he heard the word 'rippers' he burst into tears.

“No,” he said, stamping his powerful chubby foot. “No, no, no, no, no!”

This summoned Quistis, who Seifer in particular often suspected was training herself up to be a kind of fun-sucking Guardian Force. There to back up all the babies, to give strength to the weaklings, and to destroy any prospect of happiness that the stronger children at the Orphanage might achieve.

Squall thought the same, but not in so many words.

“We can’t hear about the Underworld or those stupid Rippers again!” Quistis said. “Zell couldn’t sleep for a _week_.”

“Good,” Seifer retorted.

“Makes him stronger,” Squall told the kitchen table.

“Now-” Cid began.

Quistis began shouting at Seifer and Seifer began shouting at Quistis. Selphie and Irvine ran in, delighted at the all the noise. shouting brought Irvine and Selphie down on them.

“Are we gonna hear about the Rippers again?” Selphie said, her eyes growing wide. She hopped from foot to foot. “Let’s do it! No, let’s not! Well. Yes! Let’s do it! Only they’re scarier this time. So maybe let’s not! But let’s do it anyway!”

"I don’t think I wanna hear that story again,” Irvine said, looking worried. “Unless she wants to. Then I guess I do.”

Now Ellone trailed in, having secured her dolls in a secret place. She said, “Why don’t we just ask Matron to read Lightning Looks For Her Sister again?”

“No!” cried every single child in the room.

Except for Zell, who had cried himself into a heap on the floor by this point. He raised his tear-streaked head hopefully and nodded. “Boxer’s cool.”

“That boxer in that story is _stupid_ , with stupid ideas and a stupid face and a stupid coat,” Seifer said dismissively.

Zell began crying again. Sis and Quistis began to chide Seifer. Seifer began to shout at them for being horrible fun-killing jerks. Selphie made it known that she thought everyone but Irvine was a jerk. Quistis began yelling at Selphie. Irvine began yelling at Quistis. Squall pulled up a chair at the kitchen counter and informed the counter that everyone here was very loud and also they were all horrible, every last one of them.

Matron walked in.

“What did you _do_?” she asked Cid.

Cid, standing forlorn and terrified in the center of the kitchen, shrugged. “The Rippers?” he said, by way of explanation.

When Matron next spoke, her voice was very low and soft, but everyone heard it anyway, even above all the noise, because when Matron spoke, you listened. It was a kind of hidden terrible power Matron had. Matron said, “No. I don’t think so. That frightened most of them last time.”

Everyone in the room looked relieved at this pronouncement, except for Seifer and except for Squall. Seifer stomped his foot and dislodged a loose floorboard. Squall scowled at the counter.

“We have Steiner’s Big Day that we can read tonight,” Matron offered.

Groans from everyone but Zell. Selphie and Irvine began to look repentant, regretting their earlier waffling about the Rippers. Seifer smirked at them, superior, then remembered that his story choice had lost out, so he became angry all over again and balled his hands into fists and sat on the floor and hit one of those fists against the loose floorboard.

For Squall’s part, he only told the counter, very seriously, “I would rather lose all my hearing than read Steiner’s Big Day again.”

Matron and Cid glanced at him, alarmed.

“There’s also From Sewers to Sky Piracy,” said Matron.

At this, even Quistis became regretful. That one sounded like an interesting book, but it was seventeen pages of political dithering that went over their heads, with very little actual sky piracy to speak of. 

“Even the sky pirate in that book thinks he’s too cool for it,” Squall muttered.

“Can’t blame him,” said Seifer.

Cid took in the sea of regretful and put-upon faces (and Zell, still sniffling into the floor). He glanced at his beautiful wife, who was tapping her foot in annoyance at him. He looked down at his bag, where one brand new deluxe train set sat forlorn and unwanted. He said, “Tell you what? I have an idea. I’ll tell you a whole new story!”

Seifer stopped pounding. Zell stopped crying. Selphie stopped tangling her barrette in Irvine’s hair and just let it dangle limply behind his ear.

“I don’t know that—“ Matron began.

“You have to make dinner anyway,” Cid said. “And you deserve some time off from these rascally little gangsters!”

“ _I’m_ not a—“ Quistis said.

“You are,” said Seifer.

“You kinda are,” sniffed faithless Zell.

“She so is,” Squall told the counter.

“We all are,” Ellone said fairly, settling the whole thing. “We’re orphanage gangsters.”

“Who are going to straighten up! Live right! Go bathe themselves!” Cid said, realizing that this was his moment to take command of the whole unruly lot. He injected military precision into his voice. All of the children straightened up right away, even Seifer. “Ellone! You’re the boss. See that they do it well! You’re squad leader! Seifer, B-for-Boy Team command. Then both squads reconvene at the boys’ nursery. Nineteen hundred on the _dot_!”

“Yes, sir!” said Irvine, impressed in spite of himself.

“Then,” Cid said mysteriously, “We tell the story of…”

“Just make sure it’s not—” Edea began.

“The Duchy of Lost Children!” Cid boomed.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Edea.

She could not have made the story sound more promising if she’d tried.

“I have Tidus Plays Blitzball,” she said, making a last-ditch effort to save the children from a sleepless night.

“No!” cried every last child, even Zell. Even Zell hated that one. And even Zell was interested in the new story. He submitted himself to Seifer’s bossy manhandling in the boys’ bathroom with much less crying than usual.

At nineteen hundred on the dot they assembled to hear the story. Matron had filled the house with the smell of homey, boring old chicken-cactuar soup. This did nothing to quell the excitement spreading among the children. Cid was already in his arm chair when they reconvened. He was still a short, gentle, ugly little man, but when he spoke his voice came out clear and powerful.

“This is a story of Hyne.”

The children glanced among themselves, confused. Was this a religious story? Had Cid tricked them into a lesson? Many began to look mutinous at the thought. Cid lifted his hands out placatingly.

“This has no moral!” he assured them. “That’s why they never tell this one. No moral at all. No use to tell in church or at school.

“Now. People believe that the ground beneath us is a dead thing. But Hyne knew better,” Cid said. “Hyne was born from the earth, from a marriage of wild moon monsters when they hit the earth’s surface and the orderly rays of the sun, that gave those monsters thought and magic. They moved about the earth and died there, and their magical bones became embedded deep beneath the ground and attained new life, and this became Hyne. Born out of the cauldron of the earth. Out of the—“

“Underworld,” whispered Seifer. “Where the Rippers are.”

“Shhhh,” said the others.

“No, no,” said Cid, “Well, yes. But this is a different story. A different take on the Underworld. People say the Underworld is just home to dirt and worms, but it is not. It is the heart of our planet. Just as in the heart we have secret thoughts and desires and terrors, so too in the Underworld are packed valuable jewels and metals and teeming lava full of life, and also horrible beasts to beat us back from these things. The Underworld is the great lump deep inside that pumps to keep the earth alive, a land where magic sunlight was buried within the strong moon monster bones, and where the sunlight and bones became lava. Lava lets itself escape, now and then, bubbling up in volcanoes, releasing, bleeding out onto the surface through the tops of the Trabia mountains. This was how Hyne came to be. He was bones that were melted into one great person, the first person. And he didn’t come from the sun or the moon. He came bleeding out from the center of the earth.

“The Earth had designed Hyne to be a perfectly balanced being, moon and sun, magic and strength, wild monster and orderly light. All in one. He was like all the other wonderful things the earth produces, gleaming rubies and carbuncles, emeralds and delightful diamonds, metals to makes weapons with. This is why we call him God. Because he was greater than the things he found on the surface. First, he found actual sunlight, which blinded him initially and gave him a headache. Sunlight in its strongest form, not melted down and contained as it is in the ground, but simply pounding away at you, is a horrible, conquering thing. It leaves you aching and thirsty. It did this to Hyne. So Hyne split the earth with a metal blade, and up bubbled the secret hidden springs underneath the world, making the oceans and rivers for him to drink.

“Next Hyne had to contend with the moon monsters. These are magical beings called down to the world by some unknown force. They still plague us today. Though they were Hyne’s cousins, they were capable only of savage, impulsive thoughts. They had not been tempered by the ground, as Hyne had been. So Hyne struck them down, and for a hundred years he battled them, until their numbers dwindled.

“We know the old myth now. Hyne became tired, and fell asleep, and to keep the monsters at bay he used the earth to make more people, companions for himself, to do his work for him while he rested. But when he woke, the people had multiplied, and they say that Hyne—“

“Burned up all the children!” Seifer crowed.

Zell gave a squeak, and buried himself in his chocobo.

Up came Cid’s finger again. “That’s what people _say_ ,” Cid said. “But I’ve been somewhere, long ago. Long ago, I chanced to visit the hidden city of Esthar—”

Gasps from all the children, save Ellone, who made a face for some reason.

“And there they tell it differently,” said Cid. “There, they say he did not get rid of the children at all. Hyne woke, and was surprised to see so many new people. But he did not hate them, initially. The people were like him. They had come from the ground. They were powerful and wonderful bits of life that had once been buried. Hyne had dug them up and brought them to the surface, and at first they loved him. And Hyne, too, loved them at first. For he had come of the ground, too. At one time they had all been ground, been connected. So he called the people his sisters and brothers, and believed they were all the same.

“But they were not the same. The earth will give us topazes and sapphires, tourmalines and amethysts, and all these things are very different. So too with the people. Hyne’s creations were not identical to him. They had minds of their own. They made a poor army, always squabbling and expressing their own opinions, and going against the commands Hyne gave them. Some of them were honorless brigands from the start. Others, real diamonds at first, until they let themselves become cut into vagabonds, rebels. Many turned against Hyne, and many more simply did not accept his brotherhood. They preferred to be their own beings.

“This enraged Hyne. Never had he considered that he might feel as he did when the people rebuffed him. Lonely. He had always been _alone_ , of course. But for the first time he began to be afraid, because now there were other creatures in the world who could think as he did, and yet they did not. They thought their own thoughts. All except the small ones.

“You see, the people had devised a way to make newer, smaller people. I won’t tell you the details. You’re too young—“

“Aw,” said Irvine.

“Shhh,” said everyone else.

“These were children,” said Cid. “And children are very open. They find it easier to connect with others than adults do. This why we have to tell them stories, to teach them ways to think for themselves—“

“That sounds like a moral,” Selphie said warningly.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Cid. “But the point is: the children accepted Hyne. They still trusted him and loved him. They followed his commands, and gladly became his army. But this enraged those older beings that had turned against him. So Hyne gathered up the children and retreated to this very shore, to a great castle he built for them. And there he prepared them for battle. At first, it did not occur to Hyne to worry for their safety. He saw the children as rightfully willing to die to keep the world all connected. And in fact they were. They wanted to do just that.

“But there was one problem,” Cid said. Then he stopped, put his hand to his brow. He shook his head, almost mournfully.

“What?” Seifer asked him.

“Yeah, Cid, what was it?” Quistis said.

“Tell us,” Squall demanded of his quilt.

“It is very hard not to care for children,” Cid said. “Children are not like monsters. They are people. And when they enter your life, if you are not careful, you will begin to love them. No one had ever warned Cid about this—“

“Cid?” said Seifer, suspicious.

“Hyne,” Cid said quickly.

Seifer would ridicule you if he found you going soft on him.

“I mean Hyne. No one had ever warned Hyne. So he began to love the children, and when he looked over his battlements and saw the rest of the people turning the metals of the earth into weapons, he realized how awful it was to sacrifice the children to this. So he didn’t.”

“What?” said Seifer.

“He didn’t sacrifice them,” Cid said. “Hyne was magic incarnate, remember? Moon magic and sun strength. Or was that sun magic and moon strength? Either way, he had more power than the people suspected. And when they went to retrieve their children, with blades and maces, Hyne did the best thing he could do for his beloved army. He sunk his duchy, his castle, and all the children in it, deep within the life-giving earth.”

“He buried them?” Quistis said, horrified.

“He saved them,” Cid said, “Or so he thought. He believed he was sending them to a time and place where they would always be safe, always be connected to him. Back beneath the harsh, chaotic world. To the heart of things.”

There was silence.

“This,” Cid finished, “Is what we call the Duchy of Lost Children. All people are descended from the beings who turned against Hyne. But our cousins, the loyal ones, Hyne sunk beneath the earth. The Underworld took them back in. Swallowed them up again.”

Zell began to cry.

“C’mon,” Seifer said, unimpressed. “That’s not so bad.”

“He _buried_ them,” said Ellone.

“No wonder people ended up ripping off his skin,” put in Selphie.

“He wasn’t bad, though,” Squall told Zell’s chocobo. “ _He_ thought he wasn’t.”

This became a point of contention. To Irvine, Selphie, Quistis, Zell, and Ellone, it was clear that Hyne was bad. To love children and line them up into an army did not sound like real love at all. Besides, Hyne’s flesh, the part of him left after his strong skin had been surrendered to humanity, the _magic_ part -- that had turned into sorceresses. And sorceresses were bad. Everyone knew that.

“They’re not so bad,” Seifer protested.

Seifer had recently watched a movie with a very beautiful and sympathetic sorceress in it, and been very affected by the whole experience.

“They’re not,” said Squall.

Squall hadn’t liked the movie as much. It had made Ellone sad. It was just that Squall sometimes suspected that Matron was a sorceress, and this was solid proof that sorceresses could be good.

She was, and they could be.

She chose this moment to walk in. Everyone was fighting. Or, well. Everyone was fighting with _Seifer_ , sole Defender of Hyne (for his part, he thought sinking into an adventure beneath the earth wouldn’t be so bad anyway). Only Squall wasn't fighting with Seifer. He was simply occasionally corroborating Seifer’s points, and addressing this corroboration to a mountain of pillows.

“ _Cid_ ,” Edea said, exasperated.

“This is good,” Cid said defensively. “They’re thinking for themselves.”

Edea shot him a frustrated look.

She managed to quiet the children and shuffle them back into the kitchen for dinner. How? Special sorceress powers, no doubt. No ordinary human woman could have calmed down even just Seifer, let alone the whole orphanage gang, when they got going.

“Come on,” she said, “All of you! It’s your favorite soup tonight, and then rest.”

Whining from the children.

“No complaints," Edea said, "Everybody needs rest.” Then, to Cid, in an undertone, “Even if every time a certain _someone_ visits, I have to spend the night warding off bad dreams.”

Cid hung his head. He followed the first troop to the kitchen. Seifer and Squall were last out of the room.

“I wouldn’t mind going down into the earth,” Seifer insisted stubbornly.

"There's Rippers down there,” Squall told him, the first time Squall had directly addressed anyone since this morning, when he’d informed Sis that he thought most people were a headache and she was the only exception.

“So what?” Seifer said. “You scared of Rippers?”

“You’re scared,” Squall shot back.

“I’d kill ‘em with my gunblade,” Seifer said.

“Run ‘em through,” said Squall.

“Crunch up their bones,” said Seifer, with satisfaction. “Bet I could kill more than you.”

“No way,” Squall scoffed.

“Way,” said Seifer. “Bet you couldn’t kill a Nether Ripper if it stole your girlfriend and tore up your house and killed your mom and spit in your face.”

Squall eyed him. “I could.”

“You're on, then,” Seifer said.

“ _Boys_ ,” Matron said warningly.

-

Years later.

It was March 20th again, only this time it fell seven months after the Ultimecia War. That war had reduced far-off Northern Trabia to rubble. But no longer. They’d had seven months to work at the place, and so Trabia was starting to look less like a burned-out, depressing shantytown and more like a burned-out shantytown with real promise.

This was nice.

It was also largely due to the efforts of the woman who’d bombed the place, though, and that was less nice. From the local Trabian perspective.

Edea had gone haywire. Wrong. So the local Trabians did not want her here. They called her a witch. She wasn’t, not anymore.

But this made very little difference to the locals. There was no way to spin the story that didn’t lay some of the blame on her. Cid had tried. But she and Cid were no longer a united force, a marriage of sensible kindness and exciting and foolish romance. Edea had moved beyond him too many times, gone to where homely, small Cid Kramer could not follow. She’d gone and become possessed without him. And recruited knights for Ultimecia without him. And murdered presidents without him. And blown up Trabia Garden, and so on.

Their relationship wasn’t in the best place right now.

He still adored her, of course. But it was uneven adoration. She found, horribly, suddenly, that she couldn’t quite reciprocate it anymore. Not to the same extent.

She looked over an old picture of him once she was alone in her hotel room. Not just a picture of him. A picture of all of them, taken with the camera that he’d given her. Left to right: Cid and Seifer, Quistis and Zell, Selphie and Irvine, Herself, Ellone and Squall. Cid was holding Seifer. Seifer looked annoyed, but had submitted to it with all the grace that his rough four-year-old self had been able to muster.

Edea felt a powerful sense of guilt slide over her. She covered up that side of the picture with one long-fingered white hand. This left Quistis and Zell.

Quistis! So beautiful, and kind to the others. And _good_. An essentially good person. Always Edea’s lieutenant, back then. Always willing to look out for the weaker ones. She’d been adopted early, for being so beautiful and so good. But her adoptive parents had not been very nice. They’d just been available and looking to buy a beautiful child. Edea had gone with it at the time. She’d believed, somewhat foolishly, that a child like Quistis could make a home anywhere.

And she’d had bigger things to worry about then than Quistis’s home life.

She stretched a finger over that side of the photo.

Next came Selphie and Irvine. One whose new home she’d destroyed. Another who’d been left remembering the orphanage for years, but with no way to get in contact. He’d tried, and Edea had instructed Martine to gently rebuff him, because she’d assumed this would be safer for Irvine in the long run. It hadn’t been.

Edea shifted her palm this time, covering up one, two, three, four, five, six faces.

Next was herself. She covered that one, too.

Then came Ellone, isolated and miserable for years, trapped with the White SeeDs. There the guilt was _definitely_ too much.

The only one left was Squall. And he was doing well. So well. Edea felt her heart swell at the thought. True, she’d done less than she would have liked to bring about his success. But neither had she contributed to his unhappiness. She could say, honestly, that she’d done right by him. Squall would now go down in history, eternal, forever a mark of true courage in battle.

Well. That was nice.

Wasn’t it?

And that was the last thought Edea had before someone tapped her shoulder. She whirled around.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you came after all. I wanted to talk to you. I… I learned a lesson, after all this. And I wanted to say—“

The blade pierced her just above her shoulder. Her vision went black.

-

“Oh, look, Squall,” Rinoa said. “My friends from school!”

It was a week earlier – March 13th. Friday the 13th, and Squall Leonhart was not a big believer in the superstitious, but he ought to have been, because it was clearly not going to be his day.

They were in Gryphon House, a landmarked mansion in Deling City that also housed Rinoa’s old school library. Squall had never been much of a reader, aside from the required Garden training manuals and Weapons Monthly and the like, but Rinoa inhaled books like they might crumble into dust before her very eyes. She was here for two books in particular: Cloncio Achilleviam’s very rare _The Duke_ , a Dolletian renaissance-era political tract that had landed its author in prison for most of his life. And _How To Keep From Making Enemies While Still Successfully Manipulating People_ , a bestseller among the Galbadian elite.

Also basically anything on sorceresses from the Galbadian continent. Literally anything. She’d worked her way through Esthar’s resources in an alarmingly short time, but it seemed that where a sorceress grew up could influence how their powers developed. Rinoa was (regrettably, to her mind) Galbadian by birth and breeding. And so it only made sense to come to Galbadia, even if most of the really useful books here had doubtlessly been burned or consigned to Vinzer Deling’s private library.

Rinoa was a sorceress, a politically-minded one if not a very good one. She hadn’t been one long enough to be a very good one. She only knew a handful of spells. She had to teach herself, because every sorceress was different enough that even someone who’d been a sorceress for a very long time, like Edea, couldn’t often explain how Hyne’s power would manifest in another person. The first really worthwhile spell Rinoa had inadvertently learned was invisibility, three months into the whole sorceress thing. But she couldn’t extend it to other people, so she didn’t use it often. She stuck by her friends, and wouldn’t have left them standing around in a lurch, staring at the empty space where she’d stood moments before. That would have been a nice sorceress trick, she always said. But it wasn’t a very nice person trick.

Invisibility becoming her first perfected (okay, nearly perfected) spell probably said something about her. Namely, that she was perhaps not enjoying life as a well-known sorceress. And it definitely said something about how unfair the universe was that the way the spell worked, for Rinoa, sometimes involved her erupting into a brilliant display of white feathers before vanishing. For absolutely no reason. The feathers didn’t _do_ anything. They were just needlessly flashy. This was the other reason she didn’t use the spell very often.

Four months in she’d learned some basic telekinesis, which she still couldn’t quite control. It was more of a hindrance than anything else. Sometimes she levitated her dog, who seemed to enjoy it. That was the only perk.

Then came full mastery of flight, a natural extension of her telekinetic abilities. Rinoa had almost been lost in the far reaches of space this one time, so she didn’t actually like this either. She worried that she’d float up and never come back down again.

She'd also found that she could sense any magic used within a few hundred meters of her location. That was the slightly uncomfortable headache she always seemed to have when in B-Garden; she just hadn’t realized it was anything but a headache while at B-Garden, because almost everyone there was using GF magic all the time. But when she’d come back to Deling, on magic lockdown thanks to Sorceress Edea’s takeover, any nearby soldier’s Scan and Cure and Fira hit her with sudden discomfort. So then she realized what the headache really was: a magically-induced bother. 

Someone was casting in the depths of the library right now, probably illegally for all she knew. It gave her what felt like a soft, irregular tap-tap-tap across the front of her skull. Sudden, off-putting, and unpleasant.

And that wasn’t the oddest side effect.

One morning, two months ago, she’d woken up speaking and writing flawlessly in some unknown language, possible Middle Trabian, or else a very early variant on Estharian. Maybe even pre-Ancient Centran, which was crazy, because she hadn’t even known there was a _pre_ that had come before the Ancient Centrans. She managed to infect some of her friends with it. They stood around babbling in Ancient Centran until it wore off. Her friends didn't seem annoyed, because Rinoa certainly could have done worse to them.

They'd discovered that she could mute people. Not permanently. Just until she decided to take it off. No echo screens, remedies, elixirs, esunas, or treatments made a difference; it all came down to Rinoa’s will. That scared her, and so all her friends pretended it didn’t really scare them, but it obviously did. Only Squall was unfazed. He usually was, when it came to Rinoa. He’d sworn he’d never be afraid of her, a personal challenge, and as far as everyone could tell he seemed to be meeting it.

This was Squall. He never backed down from a challenge.

Rinoa, too, thought Squall would go down in history. If only because of sheer stubbornness. It wasn't in Squall’s nature to give up. Tenacity was his number one quality. People thought it was silence, or a propensity for stunning victory, or else courtly knighthood and innate nobility. But his tendency toward silence – his girlfriend was discovering – was simply a byproduct of a stunningly lonely childhood full of abandonment. And victory had to do with fate and the alignment of the planets and hard work and friends. As for nobility -- that was something people just liked to imagine about him. Not Squall. Squall thought everyone who dreamed up concepts like 'innate nobility' tended to be morons.

Tenacity, though.

Only once in his life had Squall ever given up. On people, that is. On humanity. On any kind of human connection. He’d effectively sealed off any kind of interest in others, or desire for their wellbeing, and he’d done this stubbornly, thoroughly, perfectly. He did nothing imperfectly. It wasn’t that he was a perfectionist; it was just that he tended to be better at nearly everything than almost anyone else, to an extent that almost made Rinoa jealous.

But he’d still given up. And he was in some way ashamed of it now, though the shame was rooted in his unconscious mind, Rinoa thought, because she could feel enough of her knight’s emotions to know that he carried that shame with him. But he never admitted it to her, so possibly he didn't know he was ashamed. Maybe the strange mechanisms of Squall’s overactive, tenacious brain kept his shame over giving up buried deep, motivating him without his knowledge.

He would not give up again. Giving up was not in his character.

Even if sometimes, like right now, he clearly sorely _wanted_ to.

“Your friends all hang out in their old school library?” Squall said.

“That is a little weird,” Rinoa allowed.

She called out to her friends. They called back. The general noise they produced left Squall blinking in distaste.

Rinoa moved to greet them, but Squall did not, and since her hand was on Squall’s arm she mostly moved half a foot in their direction and then stopped, realizing that the person she was holding had suddenly taken on the implacable qualities of one of the library’s many decorative statues.

“How many of them are there?” Squall forced out, after a minute.

“Looks like all nine in my old class,” Rinoa said. She said this primly. She felt like she ought to consider apologizing to him for having so many unexpected friends. But she was thoroughly convinced that she shouldn't _have_ to apologize for having friends.

“Nine!”

“No, look. There’s Missy from class B, with that red book. Ten, I guess.”

Grimly: “Ten.”

“That’s nothing. There are about a fifty students in the whole school at a time. That’s a whole fifteenth of the Garden population. Or something like that. So many people, huh? So many.”

Squall glared at her. He suspected she was having fun with him. She was.

“You should come greet them with me,” Rinoa said. “You don’t think it’s too much for you, do you Squall?”

She didn’t make it sound like a challenge. Much.

“I can do this,” Squall said.

He could, too. She believed in him.

Plus, she suspected that after it was over he’d call in to _his_ friends (all four of them, which was the number of friends Squall generally assumed a sensible person had) to complain bitterly about the whole thing.

-

While Squall was so struggling, someone – not a particular friend of Squall’s, since the list of Squall’s friends was fairly short, and this person wouldn’t have been interested in being on it anyway – raised a mud-splattered hand at the rear door of the orphanage and knocked.

It was a pale hand, underneath all the mud. Long-fingered, as though designed for greater things than mere knocking, but also calloused, a fighter’s hand.

" _Cid_ ,” the person choked out.

Cid didn't live at the orphanage, not formally. He was now living nearby, enjoying his retirement. But he wasn't at his official new residence, and neither was his wife, the witch (not that this person wanted to encounter the witch), and so it became necessary to seek him out in the environs.

A terrible necessity. Cid’s guest was in no condition to go wandering around Centra. Besides their general griminess, which obscured their pale hair and made it hang limp, greasy, and filthy, they looked as though the ground itself had swallowed them whole and spit them back out again. Mud-encrusted boots, mud-encrusted pants, mud on their long, battered coat. Mud in their wounds, which dripped a trail of blood to the orphanage door.

"Cid!” they tried again.

This was clearly a very unlucky person. But perhaps the stars had aligned for them, for once. Cid was inside the orphanage and heard the second shout. He went to the door and opened it a crack, then opened it wider when he saw who it was.

“…Cid,” said this person, falling into him. He was barely able to catch them in time. “Crater… In Kash…”

They coughed violently, hacking up blood or earth or both. It stained the front of Cid’s shirt. Kind, ugly Cid couldn't bring himself to care.

“In… Ruins…” this person said mournfully. “In…the…desert….”

“Tell me,” Cid said urgently, putting their face between his hands.

“Cid…” they said. “He…”

“Easy now,” Cid said gently.

“He said…to…tell you…

“ _Rippers_.”


	2. Chapter 2

Later that day, Squall did call his four friends. And since reaching out to anyone about anything was a big new thing for Squall, Zell, the one who’d taken the call, felt they had to be sympathetic.

“Rinoa has friends,” Zell said. He nodded at Squall’s image on his fancy new Estharian vidphone and crossed his arms like he disapproved of Rinoa having friends.

“Duh,” Selphie said.

She took a sip of her milkshake and waved at some passing Estharians. She didn’t know them. And they probably didn’t recognize her; she was traveling incognito. But then maybe she did and maybe they did. She liked to get to know everyone, and everyone invariably got to know her.

“Everyone has friends,” she continued. “Honestly.”

Zell and Irvine shared a look. After a second, they brought Squall’s grim phone face into the loop. It became a series of three-way looks. Quistis noticed them doing it and invited herself in. Four identical looks. 

Everyone did not have friends. Selphie had friends. Selphie managed to make friends with everyone.

“I mean, imagine not having friends,” Selphie mused, oblivious to the circle of looks around her.

She made, on average, six new friends every morning. Often they were people. But sometimes they were puppies or moombas or malboros. It was hard not to be Selphie’s friend. And most people didn’t want to be Selphie’s enemy.

Now, on the other hand: Irvine. Fairly easygoing. Not going to give you a hard time even if he didn’t like you. But Irvine had made only six friends in his whole life, way back when he’d been a kid at the orphanage. And then they’d all forgotten about him.

Quistis also didn't have that many friends. She had the Trepies. They were not the same thing. They tended to steal her possessions. Collect around her at lunch and gaze at her creepily. Disregard her express wishes regarding her private life, inviting people she hadn’t seen in years to drop by without informing her first, just because these strangers from her past might reveal some marvelous Quistis Trepe secret that the Trepies felt was rightfully theirs.

When, to be honest, her biggest secret was that she hated Trepies. She wouldn't have made friends with them in a million years.

Zell, by contrast, was willing to befriend anybody. Sometimes even sometimes people whom he ought to have hated. He was friendly. But he was also hyperactive, occasionally defensive, filled with a sense of righteousness that sometimes overrode social cues, and occasionally so perceptive that he left people off-balance and looking to strike back. He also had a pale face that flushed very red when he was teased. So Zell didn't collect friends. He collected bullies, and also people rolling their eyes at him. A lot.

And Squall just wasn't friendly. Before making these four friends, he hadn’t had any to speak of. The closest he’d had was Seifer, his rival. Squall regarded Seifer on some level as a manifestation of his own need to challenge himself, possibly even a very frustrating part of Squall’s darkest mind that had sprung up and taken human form. This had enabled Squall to welcome the challenge – the closest thing he had to a friend. Not as someone he was particularly certain existed independently from him or had any kind of valuable inner life. Just as a thing that echoed Squall in enough ways and challenged him just enough to register as vaguely existing somewhere out there in the ether where Squall ended and the bothersome universe of other people began.

The people who wrote worshipful articles about Squall in the newspapers, in places like Timber and Winhill, believed that Squall had to be, deep down, a friendly person: able to see the essential humanity in others, consumed by romantic passion and deep feeling.

It was probably a good thing that Squall rarely bothered to think about people in places like Timber and Winhill. He had four friends and a girlfriend to occupy himself with, and they were a lot of work already. They not only existed – they lived. Independent. Capable of leaving at any second. The whole arrangement was very messy, very difficult. Particularly since Squall took to friendship like he took to everything else, with a sort of dour stubbornness, making a heroic and arduous task out of it.

He couldn't understand Rinoa having so many friends. It had seemed to sap up a lot of energy, talking with them. First, she had what seemed like a thousand or possibly ten friends; too many to take on, in any case. Like a swarm of clinging, annoying elastoids attacking all at once. Secondly, she hadn’t even seemed to like them very much. She spoke with them in a bizarre code, all pointed references and childhood nicknames and inside jokes that no one seemed to laugh genuinely at. There were no clear rankings and there was no order of command. They all engaged in what, to Squall, seemed like political double-speak, as bad as what any Deling City official could throw at you.

Of course, her childhood friends had been the children of high-ranking Deling City officials, so maybe that was part of it. Squall’s childhood friends had been... Well. File not found. And his current friends were forthright mercenaries, like he was.

“Really,” Selphie was saying now. “Not having friends. How sad would you have to be—”

“Maybe you’re trying!” Zell said.

“It’s not your fault if you’re lonely,” said Irvine. “Everybody gets lonely.”

“Why would you want to be friends with those people anyway?” said Quistis.

“Friendship is a lot of work with no guaranteed reward,” offered Squall.

Everyone stopped to stare at the phone instead of staring at Selphie. Even Selphie stared at the phone. They expected Squall to add something along the lines of: “Oh, but obviously I’m really happy to be friends with all of you.” But he didn’t. He did throw in a “whatever” when he started to suspect they were all looking at him. They sometimes had unrealistic expectations for Squall.

Case in point: the next thing someone (Quistis) said was, “Oh, we were invited to the Presidential Palace for lunch, and Laguna asked if—”

Squall said, “Caraway just came home. I have to go.”

This was a lie. General Fury Caraway was away meeting with the Deling Interim Commissioner. He’d been home long enough to put Rinoa in a terrible mood and to order her and Squall into separate rooms. This order went entirely ignored, as he was dealing with two of the only people on the planet who refused to be intimidated by him. He’d also barked several strange father-to-potential-son-in-law observations at Squall, a sort of Rinoa care manual, composed by someone who clearly didn't know Rinoa as well as he thought he did. Even if Caraway had been home, Squall wouldn't have made any kind of time for him unless absolutely necessary.

He just didn’t want to have a discussion about Laguna right now.

Squall was always very stiffly polite to Laguna when they met up, of course. But they rarely met up. Squall avoided him, actually, which – mind you – was not giving up on Laguna, because Squall had no realistic connection to Laguna, because Laguna had never bothered to discover that Squall existed in the first place. So really, if anyone had ever given up, it was Laguna.

Who was also (Squall felt it necessary for people to know) a buffoon. Squall had weighed the pros and cons of getting to know Laguna in his mind. He could see no obvious pros.

“Okay, but Squall,” Zell said. “Just listen. He needs—“

“And the connection is bad,” Squall said shortly.

“The connection seems fine to me,” said Selphie brightly.

“It’s Deling City. All this nighttime.”

“Interferes with your wireless satellite connection?” said Irvine.

Caught out. Squall could now see four challenging faces through _his_ fancy new Estharian vidphone. Four people who he suspected wanted him to open up even more. To have a father for a friend. To have five friends. Six friends. Endless friends. On and on and on and on. Forever.

He didn’t work like that. He wasn't opposed to friendship (at this point; quite the opposite; he did see some benefits in human connection), but he knew his own limits and he didn't like people pushing him. And anyway it seemed to Squall that when other people decided you were a friendly person, the madness never ended. Suddenly you had to be friendly all the time and to everyone. And that was no way to live.

“…Yes,” Squall said. “What do you know about the Deling area?”

“I lived there for thirteen years,” Irvine said.

“I know,” Squall said, annoyed. “Rinoa’s friends were talking about you. You have quite a reputation.”

“That’s a little beside the point,” Irvine said.

“They called you a loose man,” Squall said. “A raving bisexual horndog.”

That was another lie. They hadn’t used exactly those words. Just something close to. Irvine was a notorious flirt and had trained as an assassin, so most of what people said about him was fascinating: it always involved sex and violence. And as the only Ultimecia War hero to come out of Deling and not identify strongly with Timber instead of Deling City, Irvine cut an interesting and salacious figure for the average Galbadian, never mind what the upper crust thought of him. So they hadn’t said “loose” or “raving bisexual horndog,” but something close to that. Squall was paraphrasing. Partly to alert Irvine to the fact that he was some kind of dirty backstreets Deling folk hero. But mostly because he wanted to get out of the conversation.

And besides: he suspected that outing Irvine as a raving bisexual horndog would surprise exactly no one in their group. It might even leave Irvine feeling proud of himself.

“I’m flattered and touched that they thought of me,” Irvine said now. “But it's still beside the point.”

“And Squall,” said Quistis, “Listen. You don’t have to hide.”

“Yeah,” said Zell. “Everybody knows Laguna’s your father.”

He said this like it was meaningful. Zell couldn't do subtle, but he could do meaningful like a champ. He put his whole body into it. His hands stretched out. His knee tapped excitedly. He began to look like he was gearing up for the fight of his life.

Squall could only see his face through the vidphone, but he could easily envision the kind of buzzing energy Zell was conveying to everyone else. Zell believed things like this mattered.

But this didn't matter. The word 'friend' had only just begun to have any kind of meaning for Squall. 'Father' was going to have to wait. It wasn’t that Squall had no experience with father figures. Cid Kramer had been one of the only constants in his life, guiding him at every step, building up Garden just as he built up Squall, and for the same purpose – to fight the threat of the sorceress.

So, if truth be told, if Squall was going to try and establish a father-son relationship with anyone, he was more inclined to try for Cid. Cid had some meaning in his life. He doubtlessly had some meaning for Cid.

Laguna, by contrast, was a stranger.

“Give Sis my love,” Squall said mildly. His face blinked out of view. The call went dead.

“I sometimes think we expect too much of him,” Quistis said, after a bit.

-

“I wonder if I should have expected more of him,” Cid told his patient.

He’d dragged his guest away from the orphanage, back to his home. There, he had potions and treatments and sorceress remedies Edea had brewed long ago.

He hoped – prayed – that they would do the trick.

His guest didn't reply. Unconscious people rarely did.

“Don’t worry,” Cid said. “I’ve sent word to Garden. We’ll sort it out. We sort out our own.”

-

In far-off Balamb Garden, the very next day, sixteen Trepies cornered Headmistress Xu while she attempted to eat her breakfast in peace.

“Eat” was a generous word. Xu didn't eat. She didn't have the time. She inhaled some coffee, glanced at a muffin, devoured half a sandwich at lunch, gorged herself on whatever was available before bed, and then repeated the process.

She was headmistress now. If she stopped to eat, Balamb Garden might revert to the state it had been in under Cid: none of the paperwork done, students running the disciplinary procedures, and possibly the creepy Shumi Guardians returning to wrench the place away from its rightful owners, the SeeDs.

Okay, Xu wasn’t sure about that last one. Mostly it just happened to be a special nightmare of hers. The point was: there were far more important things to do with her time than eat.

“Xu,” said the Trepies.

“Headmistress,” said Xu.

“I think we all know who that position really should have gone to,” said the head Trepie.

“I swear to Hyne I will revoke your club license,” said Xu.

She would, too. Xu was fiercely protective of her position. She’d worked to get to it. As a SeeD cadet, no task had been too small for her. Every job someone had given her, she'd done twice as well as expected and with more attention to detail than strictly required. When she’d made SeeD, she’d gladly taken on not just field duties and instructor duties but also tactical support, magic studies, card club, library club, and even secretarial work. That last one – ostensibly the dullest job available in Garden – had been her favorite. And also the most useful, in the end. Xu was a bang-up secretary. She knew every contact, every student, dealt with every single committee and major figure.

Not always _successfully_. But the dealings themselves had been the end, not so much the outcome of those dealings. Being a part of Garden, an integral part, had always been enough for Xu.

“This is an abuse of power,” said another Trepie.

“Also,” said the head Trepie, “You’ve already revoked our license. Four times.”

Xu squinted at her. This was entirely possible.

“Who gave it back to you?” she asked, a little dangerously.

“The Commander,” said the head Trepie smugly.

Ah. Squall. Xu didn’t hate Squall or anything, but sometimes she really hated Squall.

Squall handled things very differently than she did. To his credit, he was useful in battle. And loyal, in his own way. And a very high profile face right now, the focus of a lot of media attention. But he was also moody, silent, unpredictable. He was like a Guardian Force in human form. Vital to their success. But he came with drawbacks, and on top of that you had to struggle to get him under your control.

Not that this mattered right now. Squall was on vacation in Deling City, probably making out with his girlfriend (another high profile headache) under her dad’s nose. While Xu was here, girlfriendless, dealing with the Trepies.

“What do you want?” Xu said to them.

“Quistis Trepe is away far too often,” said the Head Trepie. “Instead of working as an instructor and aiding us with her wisdom and beauty, in her divine Hyne-given calling—“

“Wow, that’s not creepy at all,” said Xu.

“Consider what the latest Trepe Time Radio Hour said about her!”

Xu preferred not to. She kept tabs on what people were saying about her SeeDs as a matter of course, but when it came to Squall and his friends it was usually just rumor-mongering.

“She cavorts with sorceresses! And loose men! And – well, Selphie Tilmitt’s okay. But Dincht?”

Zell Dincht was, in a lot of ways, an embarrassingly awkward person, pretty much doomed to be on the bottom of many people's social totem poles until he hit his twenties and aged up into some kind of sexless instructor type. But he was also a good SeeD. And a hero. Going to go down in history. All that junk.

Not to mention inherently trustworthy. He could never lie. If he tried, you could see it written all over his body. Every Garden needed someone like that, some moral measure of the rest, an upright local boy. Honestly, if Xu could get Zell to try for instructor, she could probably keep him here even if he got injured or decided it was time to retire from field work and get married or something (all SeeDs hit their expiration date one way or another; the mercenary life was a hard one). She wanted to keep Zell around. Garden ran on subterfuge. They existed mainly to drive out Galbadians or to kill people in the shadows. And when your company was that bad, you needed a few good eggs like Zell Dincht. Or the whole thing would collapse.

So good on Quistis for making friends with the guy.

“Wow, that is such a tragedy that she has friends,” said Xu now. “I’ll get right on that. Now back off.”

She hated the Trepies with a passion. She suspected Quistis also hated the Trepies with a passion. It was hard to tell anything concrete about Quistis; Quistis was an unreal being, the Garden postergirl, an instructor barely older than her students, the top member of the card club, the face they put on all the brochures, and therefore hard to get to know as a person. But she was still a friend.

Mind, not Xu's closest friend. Quistis and Xu had not had great beginnings; judging from her earliest memories of Quistis, Xu hadn’t thought much of her way back in the day. Quistis was very very lovely, the kind of person who brought to mind phrases like “swanlike neck,” and also she was very professional, and incredibly intense. She did things like study, and train, and plan her lessons, and grade exams, and study, and train. Sometimes she found time to be better than most people at cards. But after that? Right back to being better than most people at training. And this one time, to no one’s surprise, she had helped save the world, which seemed appropriate because Quistis had to have been training and studying for something.

Still, over the years she'd started making time to shoot the breeze with Xu. They'd planned lessons together, taken down arrogant students together. Quistis seemed to have found her niche with other people now – Zell, Selphie Tilmitt, Irvine Kinneas, Squall and Rinoa. But she had still been a good friend to Xu in her own way. And Xu had her back, when it came to the Trepies. You had to have each other’s backs. Every good SeeD learned that right away.

“I'm going to talk to her as soon as she gets back,” Xu said, still lying through her teeth, but attempting a more serious tone this time.

“See that you do,” said the head Trepie menacingly.

“Oh, I will.”

“See that you do.”

This was becoming circular. And a time suck. And Xu only had so much time. She tried for pensive, just to get them off her back.

“You know, now that I think about it, it is downright bizarre that she would just…”

“Yes…?” said the Head Trepie.

“Run off to Esthar,” said Xu. “With friends!’

“Right?” said a Trepie in the back.

“Using her vacation hours!” said Xu.

Xu had actually begged her to use them. Photographers kept sneaking onto Garden to try and take pictures of her. It was becoming a real problem.

“It’s preposterous,” said a male Trepie.

“What does Quistis think this is? What kind of operation does she think I’m running?” Xu said, injecting some resentment into her tone.

Everyone expected her to be resentful of Quistis, to want to be Quistis. It was a believable lie. Unless you factored in that one time Xu had realized that being Quistis meant dealing with the Trepies, and then you realized that nope, Xu was not crazy enough to want to be Quistis.

“She thinks she’s so flawless,” Xu continued, “She probably thinks we owe her for saving us or something!”

This was when the conversation seemed to go haywire, as it often did when the Trepies were involved. Like most half-brained cultists, they adored and despised their idol in equal measure, and sane people could never really tell which impulse would win out in the end.

“We owe her too much to be quantified, but what does she owe us?” said the Head Trepie. The Trepies lapsed into silence to consider the question, blown away by this bit of Trepie philosophy.

“Can we ever really answer that?” Xu said. Muttering from the Trepies. Xu nodded sagely.

“Think about it,” she said loftily.

They seemed to. They seemed to be thinking about it really hard. While they were engaged in using their brains (or the minuscule lumps of grey matter that stood in for Trepie brains), Xu picked up her lunch tray. She edged out of the dining hall. She went up to her office. She didn't consider this making an escape because the Garden Head didn’t make escapes. The Garden Head retreated to tactically plan.

She’d been tactically planning how to get rid of the Trepies for a while. Probably better to do it when Quistis was away, right? Right. Because when Quistis was here, they got even crazier, if that was possible. Unfortunately, this might take a while, and Quistis was due back from vacation in about three days.

Xu had a file on odd happenings in Centra sitting on her desk. It had just come in today. It was from former Headmaster Cid Kramer. He’d stamped it “urgent,” but everyone knew that in Cid-speak “urgent” meant “whenever the Garden Head feels like it.” Xu had a deep-seated affection for Cid, who was more than he seemed at first glance. So she tackled the file right away, and good thing, too. Centra would be the right place to send Quistis as soon as she got back.

“Your fans are creepy. So creepy,” she told Quistis during their administrative vid meeting later in the day. “I feel like I can’t just expel them—”

“Okay, but _can’t_ you?” asked Quistis hopefully.

“I’m going to call them in for psych evaluations while you’re away,” said Xu. “I think there’s honestly something wrong with most of them. It’ll take some time to get through all of the evals, but I could probably prove them nuts in time. Then I could expel them.”

“Misrepresenting the evaluations to kick them out? That’s unfair,” put in Squall, his first contribution to the meeting.

Xu snippily told him could be assigned to Centra as well, if he was going to be like that about it, because he was long overdue for a proper mission, especially since he kept turning down all their requests from Esthar. Everybody knew all he’d be doing this weekend was making out with his girlfriend under her dad’s nose anyway. He could come back early on Monday and get back to work if he was going to be prissy.

He looked at her very grimly and said that he was the _Commander_.

This was to imply that Xu shouldn’t be pushing him around. He didn’t say it outright. It just kind of hung in the air. Squall did that a lot with the things he really wanted to say. His girlfriend was a sorceress. She had a deft touch with Squall; she was always trying to understand him. She treated him with care and devotion. He therefore seemed to assume that the entire world could read his thoughts using these same special sorceress mind tricks.

Even if Xu could have read his mind, she wouldn't have. She had neither the time nor the inclination.

She said, “Oh, well. I guess you’ll stay then. There’s no fighting you. I won’t even try. And it’s a mission from Headmaster Cid. He wanted to see you, I think. Poor Cid. He’s all alone down there, and so lonely. So, so lonely. Missing his favorite gunblade specialist. So lonely. And now you’re giving up on him, I guess.”

Squall probably didn’t care about Cid’s loneliness. Xu had to assume that other people’s emotions were a lot of work for him when he was clearly just at beginner level regarding his own. But he looked vaguely unsettled at the suggestion that he might give up on anything. He always took that as a challenge. He changed his mind about the Centra mission.

Xu had his number.

Mind, she’d lied to him a little. Cid seemed to be doing fine. Very busy, whenever she checked in. Even more evasive than usual. But he didn’t seem to be missing his favorite gunblade specialist at all. In fact, Cid being a crappy judge of character, his favorite gunblade specialist had never even been Squall.

-

“I can get you as far as Dollet,” Cid told his guest. “But you’ll have to get better before I can feel comfortable putting you on a transport. Though I guess I should do it before any SeeDs get here.”

His guest said nothing. His guest was asleep.

Cid said, “Xu won’t risk high level people. Not with the mission report I’ve given her. But I just wish Edea were here. She would know what to do. Went up to Trabia. Thinks she has to make up for it.”

His guest still said nothing. Obviously.

Cid said, “Sounds like other people I know, huh?”

Silence in the Kramer household.

“Yeah, sorry,” Cid said. “That’s a bad joke.”

-

March 17th. Three days after the Administrative Meeting. Vacation for Squall and Quistis was over. They were on their way to see Cid. Cid was lonely. Possibly. According to Xu. But then how would she know? Who really knew what to make of Cid?

“He was an excellent Headmaster,” said Quistis. She said it like she was reciting something.

“He was a Headmaster, anyway,” said Zell.

They’d brought Zell along largely because Zell had pestered them over it. For months, anytime he'd been home, his mother in Balamb had been throwing girls at him, beginning with the Library Girl and ending with the freakin’ bait-and-tackle girl who lived on the pier and had a glass eye. His parents were disappointed that the Library Girl hadn’t worked out. Possibly even disappointed that the Library Girl had forced Zell to reconsider certain aspects of his identity.

Ma in particular thought that, heroism having been gotten over with, Zell now owed it to the world to pass on his heroic genetic material, and also to give his loving mother grandchildren. Zell had been very direct with her about the fact that this was never in a million years going to happen. She loved him, so she took it well. But, if he was being honest with himself, she was a little let down over the whole thing; and he didn’t want to deal with her crestfallen expression. Or her subsequent decision to try and set him up with the guy who sold train tickets to Timber.

Zell was an honest person. Taking honest inventory of his feelings (rapid-fire, while punching the air inside their transport sub, because that helped him think), he assessed Cid. And he realized that Cid was probably, honestly, much more manipulative than Cid let on.

“Headmaster Cid never gave up on a soul,” Quistis was saying. “He was patient and understanding with SeeD cadets of all ages.”

“Including the really young ones already being trained to be killers, so that we could all eventually get shoved at a sorceress,” said Zell. “Look. That’s weird. Isn’t it?”

Zell had dreamed of being a SeeD as a kid. It had seemed so impersonal, so professional, so _cool_. Cid Kramer had been a far-off, distant name then. A great thinker far above you, a gentle and wise presence who could make you strong, help you learn to fight.

And then he’d learned that Cid Kramer wasn't so distant. Cid Kramer had known Zell since Zell had been a tiny baby. Told Zell some of his first bedtime stories. And then cut the connection, pretended he had no idea who Zell was, tossed some memory-draining GFs at Zell, put weapons in Zell’s hands, and pointed him at a sorceress.

Which, honestly, made the whole thing more than weird.

 _Fucked up_ was a better assessment.

“You’re a part of it too, so there’s no use acting like you’re above it,” said Squall, in a censuring tone. Squall probably didn’t know what to make of Cid. Everything Cid had done with Zell, he’d really perfected with Squall: the golden boy Cid had always meant to force into the Commander position. But, Squall being Squall, good luck figuring out how something like that had affected him, because he’d never tell you.

“And remember how Cid was at the Orphanage?” Quistis put in.

None of them actually did remember. As SeeDs, they used Guardian Forces regularly. And GFs existed to do two things: make you an unstoppable military powerhouse, and soak up all your memories. So they were very good fighters. And extremely poor remember-ers.

“He took us on a picnic once,” said Squall, to no one in particular. “No. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Yes,” said Quistis.

“Yeah?” said Squall.

“I think so,” said Quistis. “He gave me a choco-back ride. No. Maybe he gave Selphie a choco-back ride.”

Zell said nothing. He was still punching the air in silence. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking. Zell was in thinking overdrive.

Squall and Quistis didn't have parents. Not really. Sure, Quistis had two people who wrote her sometimes and reminded her that they'd only adopted her because such a pretty girl really should have been made Headmistress or at least wife of the Commander by now. And Squall had Laguna, who he liked to pretend didn't exist, even though this was silly because Laguna headed up the most powerful nation on the planet.

But only Zell had a Ma and a Pa. Ma with her matchmaking skills and Pa with his unflappable acceptance and Pa with his deliberate calm and Ma with her love.

They were worth a million of Cid Kramer. They'd never wanted anything out of their charge – their son – they just wanted him to be happy. Whereas, with Cid, any desire for their – his, Squall’s, Quistis’s, Selphie’s, Irvine’s – all of them… Any wish for their happiness had always been incidental to bigger things, hadn’t it?

Yeah. It had been.

It wasn’t like that didn’t make sense. Years ago, Cid and Edea had discovered that someday a crazy and evil sorceress would want to compress time. So why worry about the emotional needs of a bunch of orphans? There were bigger things to deal with. But even so. In Zell’s head there were all these slowly-resurfacing memories of Cid Kramer laughing with them as children, giving them choco-back rides, taking them on picnics...

But that wasn’t Cid Kramer. Not really. Zell knew Cid Kramer. Cid Kramer had become – had had to be, maybe – the kind of man who’d done anything to accomplish his goals. Anything. Put gunblades in the hands of five year olds. Sent young men to kill their mother figures. Waited and watched and made deals with the Shumi.

He wasn’t just some fat old lazy guy cowering in the corner. He was an opportunist, cunning, a survivalist.

A Sorceress' Knight. Maybe even Seifer-Almasy-the-first.

Squall aside, Zell didn’t – couldn’t – have very high opinions of guys like that. Zell wasn’t a guy like that himself. Yes, he was SeeD. Yes, he would shoot and kill and punch (mostly punch) if he was told to. But he was also somebody’s kid. Which meant that he was always thinking about how other people were people’s kids, too. He had a strangely powerful sense of humanity, Zell. His humanity. Other people’s. He took it hard when people let that down, forgot to act human, screwed other people over with no reason.

When you struck out at another person, used them in a scheme, screwed them up, threw them away, blew up their Gardens, cowered instead of defending them – it wasn’t like hitting air. You were hitting something, fucking with something, with a living being. And maybe it was easy to forget that if your weapon of choice was a gunblade or a whip or your dog or something, but Zell was a martial artist. He’d chosen to be a martial artist. Because that meant you felt every hit connect; you couldn’t run away from your actions. So you understood that those actions had consequences, and in a weird way you became more cautious.

And you didn’t want to be the Knight or the SeeD commander. You didn’t want to strike out because there was some glorious end or secret plan that might justify it, in the end. That would just make you the asshole, the guy who deserved a good punch in the gut.

Zell punched the air.

Cid, he imagined, would be a lot more solid than the air. But soft. A gunblade specialist gone to seed.

No pun intended.

“I think he gave me a toolbox or something once,” Quistis said. “He was such a good Headmaster.”

Squall sighed. He said, “Matron’s the one I miss, really.”

Matron was a whole other can of grat crap. Zell’s punches got a little more aggressive.

Just a little. He couldn’t remember Matron. What he did remember was nice. Picnics. Storytime. Chocobo-back rides. But those memories were hard to reach. He had to really try to get his GFs to give them up. And when he got them back they were hazy, changed. Whatever Matron had given him, if she’d given him anything, didn’t exist as memory, just as some deep-seated impulse.

Some weird, prickly feeling that she and Cid Kramer weren’t and had never been anything like real parents, not really. Maybe they’d wanted to be. But they’d become something else entirely.

-

“Tell me about this little group of Cid Kramer’s, these enemies of the sorceress,” asked the man in red.

He said ‘Cid Kramer’ experimentally, like he couldn’t quite get his mind around the words. A couple of times he’d said, ‘Kid Kramer,’ instead, because the hard _k_ sound came very naturally to him. But otherwise the name sat heavy on his tongue. Foreign. He was miles and cultures removed from Cid.  
But, lLike Cid, the man in red had a guest.

And _his_ guest shook his head in response.

The man in red took stock of this guest. Not a bad specimen. Dark, tall, broad-shouldered, handsome cheekbones, wide dark eyes. Nothing about him seemed to have been bleached by the sun of his homeworld; he was, unlike the two who’d been brought in alongside him, almost a perfect example of a person. The real pity was that neither he nor the girl had been the ones sorceress-touched.

That had been the other one.

So it would have been high sacrilege to acknowledge this one as anything other than a future drone, a clockwork man ticking out penance until the end of his days. After all, he’d committed high crimes during the rise of Edea.

But, at the very least, there was a kind of simple loyalty to him. Maybe this guest -- or perhaps, more aptly put: prisoner -- would redeem himself yet. The man in red certainly hoped so. He had a great deal of respect for his subject already. Electricity the prisoner bore with good grace. The whip? Very similar. Temporary poisons injected into the veins made him roll his eyes back and bear it until he sweated it out. Magical ailments of all kinds only made him grit his teeth. 

And he'd never once spoken. Indeed, once they’d separated him from his sorceress-touched friend, all Raijin had been willing to give them was a baleful glare, a moan now and then, and a trickle of blood out of the side of his mouth when he bit down too hard on his tongue. So the man in red held him in very high esteem.

But relationships needed to be built on mutual respect. Didn’t they?

He fitted Raijin into the press. He watched clinically as the great torture machine squeezed down on the young man. Very big, very strong. And now feeling the weight of tons of steel squeezing down on him, crushing his broad chest. It only took a minute for fear to settle into his eyes. Good.

The man in red stopped the machine.

“It is commendable that you’ve told us little about Cid Kramer,” he told Raijin. “Or the Defeater Leonhart, or any of these worthy new names. Do you know? We’ve even heard about them down here. Fame spreads.”

Raijin coughed, spat out blood. Possibly his ribs were cracked. He said, “You took Fujin, and Seifer—“

More coughing. His lungs were probably cracked.

But this was new. A name for the great criminal, the great failure, the one soaked in sorceress magic. _Cipher_. What a funny name. The man in red laughed to hear it, and clapped Raijin on the shoulder. A cipher could be a secret, or a kind of hidden message. It could be nothing at all. It was heavy with symbolism, with things yet unrevealed – it promised something so valuable that one had to encode it. But it could also be something, as yet, unimportant.

What a very _fitting_ name. The children of Hyne knew well who to bless, and who to snare.

“That almost makes me like him,” he told Raijin. “And you’ve been a very strong, very good friend to him, haven’t you? But not so for the sorceress Edea. You were no friend of hers.”

He put a comforting hand on the sweaty skull with its close-cropped dark hair.

“’M not gonna tell you where she is,” Raijin forced out. “Don’t even _know_.”

That seemed fair. And Raijin was such an honest, loyal fellow that the man in red believed him.

“Tell me what you do know, then," said the man in red.

“She—she brainwashed him,” Raijin said.

The man in red raised an eyebrow. That didn't quite accord with what he knew, but he let it lie. Dropping the press any more might crush Raijin’s lungs, and there went the questioning.

“He knew her. He got it out of the GFs. She was supposed to be his—like his _mom_. He trusted her. Then she got picked up by Ultimecia—“

The man in red smiled. Good. Very good. 

“She says _she_ was brainwashed,” Raijin continued, struggling to form the words.

“Now, that has to be a lie,” said the man in red. “Or she was simply not a very good sorceress. It takes a very weak, very small, very fearful woman to be unable to hold her own against another of Hyne’s chosen.”

“No,” Raijin said, sounding for all the world like he didn’t want to believe that. “It can happen. To any sorceress. It’s not about weak. Because Rin—“

He stopped. Although up until now his face had been twisted in pain more often than not, it had never shown horror. Now he seemed horrified. By whatever he had been about to say.

Good. They were making progress.

“Yes?” said the man in red.

Raijin shook his head again, as best as he could trapped between the two heavy steel blocks of the press. The man in red patted his shoulder supportively. Crushing him more than this might shut him up permanently. But he could take it little by little. Start small.

He traced down one of Raijin's powerful arms, and contemplated grinding the wrist-bone to powder.

Rin. Rinoa Heartilly. News of her had trickled down even to here. And now Raijin indicated that he might know her. Very good. Raijin was an exemplary fellow. So loyal! But also so well-connected. He knew Edea. He knew Rinoa. And he probably knew something of the other one.

The man in red really was very glad to have him.


	3. Chapter 3

Some time later, in the Headmistress’s office, the normally easygoing Irvine Kinneas was looking to complain.

Not about anything Xu could help him with. Just in general.

“They called me a loose man,” said Irvine. “Bisexual horndog, fine. But _loose_? Who even uses that word anymore?”

Xu didn’t know what Irvine was expecting. He wasn't circumspect about his proclivities. If something promised him intimacy? Then he was drawn to it like a bite bug to caterchipillar feces. 

But his work was always top-notch. He was one of six world-renowned heroes and the only person ever to make SeeD without officially passing or even considering taking the standard SeeD test. And his scores out of G-Garden were better than she’d learned to expect from G-Garden. The paranoid secret blacklists Martine had kept put Irvine at “difficult” and “friendless” but also “promising if handled well” and “a natural shot.” He was a loner without being as unpleasant as Squall could get. Irvine was could actually be charming when he bothered to exert himself. In fact so charming that you forgot that a lot of the time, rather than acting like the shameless flirt he claimed he was, he was actually kind of withdrawn.

All in all, Xu didn’t hate him. Plus he was dating Selphie Tilmitt now. Maybe his worst sexual excesses were done with.

“Aaaand I don’t even know why these people think they can pass judgment on Irvy. They sound like losers. They just hang out in libraries,” Selphie told Xu.

“I hang out in libraries,” Xu said.

She did. People tended to use the B-Garden library to gossip and plan things, so it was a good place to overhear information. To get a handle on what was going on: the student-level view of Garden. Xu had a hard time getting students to really bond with her (was she too competent? Too Headmistress-ly? Cid had never had this problem), so she sometimes resorted to spying on them.

“You hang out?” said Selphie. “I thought you just worked all the time.”

Xu tried to think of a retort, but failed, because Selphie was right. And Selphie had offered to help sort through paperwork. Selphie didn’t have to be doing that, so Selphie had the social upper hand. As Selphie usually did.

Though Xu suspected she was only being helpful in order to wrangle a bigger budget for the Garden Festival Committee.

Selphie was quite possibly the hardest person in Garden to figure out. A Trabia import, she was hopelessly ditzy, very clumsy when off the battlefield; and obsessed with pop culture, the latest bands, ridiculous pulp magazines about adventuring reporters, who was dating whom and who had dumped whom in the middle of a training session. She knew everybody. Everybody knew her. She published a lot of her opinions on her blog, hiding very little, and was always very direct with people. She didn't seem especially intellectual or gifted. Just very improbably competent. And well-trained. Quick. And maybe a grade-A manipulator. Maybe. The proof of this was in how many hapless innocents were now toiling away as members of the Garden Festival Committee.

“It’s weird that Rinoa’s friends hang out in libraries, though,” Irvine said now. He had his legs on Xu’s desk. All Xu’s attempts to get him to remove them resulted in a sleazy raised eyebrow and Selphie batting at him. Then they would retreat into a bizarre courtship dance involving Selphie faking annoyance and Irvine faking even more sleaze, so by now Xu had just given up.

Plus, he was tackling the invoices from the local T-Rexaur breeders. And the complaints from the T-Rexaur Preservation Alliance. The Alliance had sprung up in Balamb determined to end what they saw of Garden’s cruel use of the creatures. Xu despised them and hated even acknowledging their existence because she privately suspected they existed just to make her life harder. So Irvine was doing her an even bigger favor than Selphie was, and Xu decided to give him a pass.

“Thing is,” Irvine said, “Not to be rude—“

“But you’re going to be anyway, aren’t you?” said Xu.

“He never learned not to be. He had no mother,” Selphie told her. “His mother was blown to smithereens in an attack on a Galbadian outpost when he was a baby—“

“I think Matron said she just got sick and didn’t get better,” Irvine said.

“My story’s better,” said Selphie, “Because explosions. And because we don’t remember our parents anyway and probably never will, so we can just make them die as horribly as we want.”

Selphie’s interests tended towards the macabre. Her humor was dark. Xu thought it was a Trabia thing. They had nineteen-hour nights in Trabia for half the year. That kind of environment made for some weird personalities.

“What did you make up for your birth parents?” Irvine said.

“Thrown before Sorceress Adel and tortured because they wouldn’t talk—“

“I wish you wouldn’t talk while we do this,” Xu said.

“—and then my dad was drawn and quartered—“

“They definitely haven’t done that since the age of Vascaroon, but okay,” Xu said.

“—and my mom, my beautiful mom, wasted away in an Estharian dungeon, dreaming of me and my eleven lost siblings until her dying hour.”

“That’s weirdly sweet,” Irvine said, “But kind of messed up.”

“I know. I have problems,” Selphie said. “I’ve never pretended otherwise.”

To her credit, this made her a better functioning human being than ninety five percent of Garden’s other tragic orphans (who made up a good sixty percent of Garden). 

“Anyway, what were we talking about?” Selphie said. “Oh, right. Rinoa’s friends.”

“You were talking about Rinoa’s friends,” said Xu. “I’m updating the budget spreadsheet.”

“Wow, Xu, that sounds so much more interesting,” said Selphie. “If you’ve got grat poop for brains.”

This was such a blatantly inappropriate thing to say to the Headmistress that only Selphie, clocking in at around five feet with a flawless field mission record and a limit break that could level mountains, could have gotten away with it. 

“Okay, but, like, Xu would hang out in a library, because Xu is, you know, not a debutante or a belle of society, or a fun kind of girl,” said Irvine.

“Xu is your freakin’ _boss_ ,” said Xu.

Irvine tipped his hat in her direction to show her that she had a point. But then he crossed one leg over the other, nudged some paperwork to the floor in the process, and kept talking anyway.

“But these are Galbadia’s elite,” he said. “Did you catch some of those names Squall dropped?”

“Like a bad STD,” said Selphie. “Same as Deling’s Ministers and Heads of State, right?”

“Right! And those people’s kids should be in a nightclub. They should be snorting tonberry dust in the back room of a Deling club. Like, who in Hyne’s wide ass hangs out in a library unless they’re poor and not cool?”

“I was raised solidly middle class,” Xu said. Irvine, like most Galbadians, had class hangups that put Dolletian elitism to shame. “And I hang out in—“

“You don’t, though,” Selphie complained. “Hang out. Ever.” Then she turned to Irvine. “Nerds, Irvy. Who understands them?”

This was rich, coming from a girl who ran six fan pages and knew more about advanced transportation technology than any other person on the planet.

“You know who’s a nerd? Tangentially? Rinoa,” said Irvine. “A hot nerd. Completely a hot nerd.”

“She’s our friend, so my jealous side can live with you saying that,” Selphie said. “And yeah. She’s a cutie.”

Rinoa chose that moment to walk in. As if Xu needed more of a headache today.

“Who’s a cutie?” she asked offhandedly. Then she turned to Xu, apparently the person she really wanted to speak to. “Headmistress Xu!”

“No, not her,” said Selphie. “She’s okay. But we meant you!”

“Aw,” said Rinoa, oddly touched.

“Okay, everybody out,” said Xu. “I’ll just do my paperwork on my own.”

Rinoa put her hands on her hips and gave the general impression that she was now planting herself in Xu’s carpet and wouldn't be moved by all the SeeDs in all the world. Since she was a sorceress and friends with five of the best SeeDs in the world, Xu could envision her succeeding at this.

“Fine,” Xu said. “What?”

“Squall says,” Rinoa began, somewhat menacingly, “That you are planning on forcing the Trepies out.”

“Really?” said Irvine. This shocked him enough that he moved his legs to the floor and sat up straight. This was the first time in their entire acquaintance with Xu that Xu had ever seen him sit up straight. Xu had known him for seven months at this point. Seven slouching, lounging, sleazy months.

“Aw, what?” said Selphie. “I’m friends with some of the Trepies!”

“Sefie, my love,” Irvine said, “Who aren’t you friends with? You’re friends with that one malboro in the Trainin’ Center that always runs away from encounters.”

“Sunny is a shrewd survivor,” said Selphie very seriously.

“And apparently you named him,” Xu said.

“I’ve gotta level,” Irvine said, “I know Sunny. I don’t even know the Trepies’ names.”

“Well, yeah, but who does?” said Selphie. “I mean, I guess it’s on a roster somewhere.”

She started poking around on Xu’s desk, as though Xu were hiding the identities of the Trepies on some kind of secret blacklist, in the vein of that psychopath, Martine. Xu made shooing motions, but to no effect.

“Some of them are competent enough, though,” Irvine mused. “But the competence never outweighs the crazy with the Trepies. It’s a tenuous balance: competent and crazy.”

Xu eyed Selphie and Irvine both at this point.

“It sure is,” she said. “Now stop wasting my time and do my paperwork, or get out.”

“Alright, Xu, but first!” said Rinoa, pointing a finger at Xu ominously. “You are being so unfair. It's an injustice. You can’t just set the Trepies up and kick them out! There should be procedures, and systems—”

Rinoa wasn't just a sorceress. She was a born crusader as well. She embodied a heady cocktail of noblesse oblige, stubborness, and her own innate sense of unfairness. And so she was the first ever sorceress to do things like liberate Timber, and champion the rights of gays and lesbians in Deling City, and donate publicly to those T-Rexaur Alliance assholes in Balamb despite her boyfriend being SeeD commander because animal rights were _important_ and also she had to be _impartial_.

Rinoa wasn’t a SeeD at all, so Xu shouldn’t have had to put up with her. Sometimes Xu really resented that she had to put up with her. She’d actually thrown Rinoa out of Garden multiple times, but Squall kept inviting her back.

“Rinoa, you are not a SeeD,” Xu said carefully. “So you do not get a say. We have had this discussion. Nine times.”

“I speak for Squall while he's away,” said Rinoa loftily. “And my friends speak for me.”

“Right!” said Selphie, jumping up and down in an impassioned manner.

“I don’t know. I’m with Xu,” said Irvine. “We can’t have crazy people in Garden. Really everybody should be getting a psych eval.”

“Thank you,” Xu said.

“Not Selphie, though,” said Irvine. “She might not pass.”

“Irvine, you wouldn’t pass!” Rinoa said.

Irvine looked thoughtful. He tipped his hat in agreement.

“And even I might not pass,” Rinoa continued, as though to teach them all a great lesson in humility and fairness.

Xu said, “You aren’t a SeeD, so—“

Rinoa ignored her. “Maybe Zell or Quistis would. _Maybe_. But Squall definitely wouldn’t pass becau—“

“Squall’s a trainwreck,” Selphie said, nodding. “Great guy. Such a trainwreck.”

“I won’t tell him you said that,” said Rinoa.

“You can,” said Selphie.

“It’s not like he doesn’t know,” Irvine added, putting his legs back up and slouching back down. “Squall’s self-aware now.”

“Okay, but,” Rinoa said, lowering her voice, “I _worry about him_.”

“Are we gossiping about your boyfriend now?” said Xu. “Could you maybe not get comfortable? Because my office isn’t the place to do this.”

“Have you seen what the papers write about him?” said Rinoa.

“Have you seen what the papers write about all of you?” said Xu.

Seriously. Sometimes she had to remind herself that it would give Garden more bad press to fire them than it would to retain them. And that they were good SeeDs. If slightly unhinged.

“He’s now going through this new phase,” said Rinoa, still ignoring her, “Where he has, and I’m not kidding here, negative social skills. I don’t mean none, like he had before. That was fine. He used to be able to go so quiet and professional! Like a dream! But now, on the number line of social aptitude, he's on the negative side. It’s like he discovered his personality, and his personality—“

“Sucks?” Selphie said.

“No!” said Rinoa. “Well…”

“Well?” Xu said. “No. What am I saying? Don’t prompt her.”

“Go on,” said Irvine, probably because he was a sleazy asshole.

“We were meeting with the new Timber delegates and the Deling City representatives, and I had to do all the talking. Not because he wouldn’t talk! Because when he did talk, he was the most undiplomatic person on the planet. He had the Galbadians ready to conquer us again, just to get back at him for being, you know—“

“A complete dick?” Selphie offered.

“Not very nice,” said Rinoa. “Let’s say not very nice. His inner self is just not very nice!”

“Shocker there,” Xu muttered.

“That’s why we have Xu, though,” Selphie said. “To talk to bigwigs and get us money and handle all the annoying stuff that Squall can’t deal with.”

“Excuse me?” said Xu. That wasn't at all how she would characterize her job. Squall wasn't what motivated her. In fact, with his sparkling personality, Squall occasionally stepped in as a truly effective de-motivator.

“Well, look, do you want Squall to do it?” said Irvine.

“I—“ 

Xu stopped. That notion was terrifying.

“Right?” said Selphie. “Trainwreck.”

“No, see, I think he can be diplomatic if he just believes in himself!” Rinoa insisted.

Rinoa was a big believer in believing. She was a dreamer. She thought you could get whatever you wanted if you wished and worked hard enough. And in her defense, you really could get whatever you wanted if you wished and worked hard enough, and also your father was General Caraway.

“I mean, that was the whole reason I asked him to Deling,” said Rinoa. “Gryphon Preparatory alums—“

“You went to prep school,” said Selphie, sounding unsurprised.

“The most exclusive prep school in Galbadia,” said Irvine, sounding even more unsurprised.

“ _Of course_ she went to the most exclusive prep school in Galbadia,” said Xu, rolling her eyes.

Rinoa put up a hand. “Whatever! As Squall would say. My point is: alumni get free access to our library, and our library has all these books on social aptitude and how to make people do what you want by convincing them that you’re nice even if you’re not—”

“I never had to learn that,” said Selphie. “I’ve just always known how.”

“It comes naturally to you,” Irvine agreed.

“And then, you know, I ran into my friends and…” Rinoa trailed off. “It was weird. I mean, not the Squall thing. Squall having social problems is normal.”

“We won’t tell him you said that,” said Irvine magnanimously.

“Shut up,” said Rinoa. “I just had a thought. That _was_ weird.”

They all looked at her expectantly. All except for Xu, who suggested (again) that she have her weird thoughts somewhere that wasn’t the Headmistress’s office. In response, Rinoa continued her personal tradition of ignoring the Headmistress.

“I’m not super close with these people,” Rinoa said. “I just grew up with them. But I would have expected to find them in the back of some club snorting tonberry dust or something. Most of them are, you know. Party animals. Not bookish. And there were a lot of things that were weird about that day, actually. It was just an odd visit.”

“Well, your boyfriend met too many people and had a small meltdown over his dad,” Selphie offered.

“Normal,” Rinoa repeated, waving her away. “No. I could sense magic in use. In the library, I mean. And – look – I don’t want to rat anybody out to the Presidential stooges for unauthorized magic use on school property, much less an old friend, but the fact is there are laws, and usually they’re not so blatant about violating them because their parents _make_ the laws, so—”

“Magic?” said Xu. “In Deling City?”

That was a problem. Xu leaned forward across her desk and caught Selphie and Irvine’s gazes. They looked grim.

“Ohhhhhhh wowza,” said Selphie. ”Not good.”

“Violation of our ceasefire agreement, right?” said Irvine.

Rinoa looked at them, bewildered.

“I think it was probably just some people junctioning where the army wouldn't look for them?” she said. “Pretty smart, when you think about it, since none of the Commissioner's advisors and staff would want to sign an arrest warrant for somebody at their alma mater, and—”

“No, no,” said Irvine. “See, last month Xu here did some talking with the Deling City bigwigs.”

“For Squall,” said Selphie, “Since he’s a mess.”

“For _Garden_ ,” said Xu irritably. “I renewed the nonaggression pact with Deling City. Not going to be long-term thing. Just a ceasefire, like you said, until we get Trabia up and running. We review it in a month. It’s routine at this point; you wouldn’t have heard much about it.”

“But you put in a new clause this last time, right?” said Irvine.

She had. The situation in Deling was complex. But to boil it down to basics: Galbadia hated Garden.

They always had, really. Cid Kramer commanded no respect in Deling City. For one thing, he was perfectly willing to take missions that revolved around stabbing Galbadia in the back. For another, Deling City had once been the greatest military power the world had ever seen. But nowadays their soldiers were shoddy. Their technology slightly outdated. Their empire? Crumbling. And a lot of that had to do with Cid, and B-Garden, and the SeeDs.

Cid and Edea had created G-Garden as a kind of compromise. Even in the early days, the Galbadians had suspected the threat SeeD might pose to them. So they’d been offered a Garden of their own, to pacify them and to keep Vinzer Deling from ordering a kill strike on what had been, back then, Cid and Dr. K and the guy who manned the front gate and some orphans they’d scrounged up from who-knows-where.

G-Garden was to have similar facilities; similar curriculum options. Like B-garden, low-to-nonexistent tuition. It would open itself up to Deling City’s shadier, more paranoid elite to cover costs, a hit squad camouflaged as a school. And the hit squad was an instant hit. Vinzer Deling and his cronies had a lot of uses for private assassins, and they liked very much that Martine, Cid’s rather faithless appointee, fed excess students right into the Galbadian army rather than recommending most of them for SeeD.

As long as there was a tenuous connection, a strange alliance between B- and G- gardens, Deling City had left B-Garden pretty much alone. They had operated under the assumption that anything Cid’s kids could do, their own could do better.

Cid, for his part, had scrambled to keep an edge over the place. He did this through magic use. GFs. There were some in G-Garden, but not very many, and Cid conspired to acquire most of these in the end through any means possible. He’d believed that GFs would mean the difference between life and death for Balamb Garden if ever they happened to go against an opponent as powerful as their sister school.

He’d been right. Xu had seen it happen. When the Shumi had turned on them and Galbadia Garden had come to Balamb island, the SeeDs and cadets had held out – just barely – not because they were necessarily better fighters, but because they had more fluency with magic and GFs than their opponents. A skinny second-year couldn’t survive against Shumi wielding natural blue magic, much less a full grown Galbadian with years of military experience, but if you equipped that second-year with Firas, Thundagas, the ability to draw, the ability to Cure, and a massive monster to boot, the tables turned.

Xu had played nice for the first few rounds of Deling City negotiations – she’d had to; they’d taken a big hit to their feeder school out in Trabia; and half the SeeDs were cleaning up moon monsters in Esthar. But she’d brought the claws out last month. Thanks to their magic and GFs, B-Garden could wipe the floor with the Galbadian army, if they had to. And Xu was going to make damn sure they kept it that way.

“I did put in an extra clause,” Xu said. “Thing is, Rinoa, all Deling City residents are required to turn over any new GFs they find in this period to Balamb Garden.”

Irvine said, “I’m pretty sure any GFs that G-Garden personnel had came here eventually. Zona Seeker’s used for training here now, not to mention Bismarck, Ramuh—“

“Right,” said Xu. “We snapped up every one Martine ever tried to hide from us. It must be some new one. Deling’s Cabinet has a handful they’re allowed to keep in Galbadia. But the only people they’ve listed as currently junctioning any of those in and around Deling are high-ranking soldiers posted at the city borders.”

Irvine said, “Maybe someone dragged one of those GFs back into the city to use—“

“Against the ceasefire. They wouldn’t dare,” Xu said. “No, if they did that? We'd be well within our rights to expose it.”

Selphie said, “So who’s got this unlicensed new GF in the middle of the city?”

“They’re hiding something. Go find out what,” said Xu. “Keep it low profile if you can, but find out at all costs. That’s an order.”

For all their crazy, she and Irvine were good SeeDs. They went when ordered. They even took Rinoa with them. When they’d gone, Xu looked over the reports Selphie had been working on and also Irvine’s response to the T-Rexaur complaints. Perfect. Literally perfect work.

She sighed. She looked at her budget spreadsheet. It was full of mistakes.

-

Raijin, the exemplary prisoner, had reached his limit.

Oh, not in terms of _talking_. The loyal brute kept his words in his head, for the most part, after letting slip about Rinoa Heartilly. Which was a shame, because any information on her was crucial.

No, Raijin had simply reached a mental limit. And it seemed prudent to patch up his mind to some degree, so that they could continue with the interrogation later on.

It had happened like this: the man in red had broken both wrists, then both ankles, then both knees. He'd discovered that even Raijin's moans of pain were polite. Somehow understated. Suitable. Like he really was the mercenary he claimed to be. The man in red appreciated this. So as he’d done all this to Raijin. he made sure to be conscientious about little things, to wipe tears from his eyes, to rub his elbow comfortingly. And he told him all about topics he thought might interest him: loyalty, criminality, knighthood, magic.

“Sei-Seifer’s more than a criminal,” Raijin forced out. “And Fujin. My—my _sister_.”

“They can’t help you, I’m afraid,” the man in red told him sadly. “A shame. A shame also that Fujin lacks the ability to receive the sorceress power, don’t you think? How different your lives would have been! Now Heartilly, on the other hand—“

Raijin clamped his mouth shut. He wouldn't speak anymore on that. Instead he was caught up in pleading for his friend, that foolish boy who’d stumbled onto so much power.

“Your friend will be useful to us as well,” the man in red assured him.

Raijin actually lunged in his bonds, _swiped_ at him.

The man in red laughed.

But of course he soon sobered, because this wouldn't do. So disrespectful. They would have to dose the prisoner with some more toxic magic. A bout of painful insanity would serve him right. 

But an hour or two later, the man in red found very little evidence that Raijin was recovering from the bout.

Raijin was screaming and screeching, his eyes wild. His mind had been slightly shifted, cast out of rational thinking, and sometimes people reacted like this. It was the subconscious coming to surface, the fears made to take hold. Because the parts of Raijin that were sensible and capable of controlling pain had been banished.

Annoyed, the man in red put those parts back in. He'd opened Raijin's mind up for too long. They would need a sorceress, now, to patch it up.

But Raijin would recover. There was a fascinating inner resilience to him, like blows and mockery and torture really meant very little to him, like he held on to some hope for something bigger.

Distantly, the man in red wondered if this was common for Kramer’s group. Were they all like this? Were they this hardy, were their spirits this buoyant and strong? Oh, that Garden in Balamb was no real target, not really. The man in red was not one of the people arguing that it should be. He thought logically, and so he knew that they only needed those who had defeated Ultimecia, and those who now bore the unmistakable imprint of the future sorceress.

But what might it mean, if they did seize that Garden?

Lucky Raijin should have some fellow prisoners! And this whole time the man in red had been assuming that Raijin was unique. But what if they _all_ struggled and fought and possessed vast reserves of grand loyalty?

Terrific.

“I surrender him to your care and you must take good care of him,” the man in red heard himself saying, distantly, to the healer.

But how frustrating it was. Their chief aims were to go unfulfilled in the meantime. They'd get more, learn more, and have more fun if they had someone else. Not just Raijin. Others. Maybe _all_ the others.

-

“Here we are,” Squall said. He said it very grimly. Like visits to Cid were arduous personal missions that he set himself. Which this one basically was.

“So you are,” said Cid.

“Cid, we’ve come to see you,” said Squall. If you looked very hard, you could actually see him checking it off in his head. Visit Cid Because Cid Is Old And Lonely And Xu Said I Wasn’t Up To The Task.

Check. Done. On with the mission.

“That’s very nice, Squall,” Cid said. “Come back tomorrow. I’m busy right now. Congrats on renewing the nonaggression pact!”

Then he shut his door in Squall, Quistis, and Zell’s faces.

There was silence for a second.

“What the hell?” said Zell.

Squall, who had been momentarily stunned to be dismissed by the man whose Garden he'd saved, snapped back to attention and banged on the door again.

“Cid!” he said.

“I’m very busy. So nice to see you!” came Cid’s voice through the door.

Squall stopped banging. He just stood there for a minute. His normally blank-if-handsome features took on a slightly petulant cast, so that suddenly he seemed less Squall Leonhart, Garden Commander, and more Squall Leonhart, offended eighteen-year-old.

“Well, this is weirdly typical of Cid,” Zell muttered. He punched one of Cid’s windowpanes in annoyance. He accidentally dislodged one of the flowerpots. It shattered. Poppies thumped sadly on the ground.

Zell didn’t even feel that bad about it.

It _was_ typical. As Headmaster, Cid had had a tendency to do things like summon you up to his office, only to run off mid-meeting after saying something ominous about how the future needed his attention. Or to show up just as you were about to get chewed out by a Shumi guardian and gently get you off the hook, only to vanish just when you wanted to ask him important questions like why the Shumi guardians were all assholes in the first place. Or to send you on missions that risked international strife with Galbadia, home of a fellow Garden, only to cower and hide when this left the SeeDs consumed by internal conflict.

That was always Cid’s way. Not a very good Headmaster or a courageous leader. Just the only one they’d ever had.

Now Squall crossed his arms and glared at the door as though he could get it to open by anger alone.

“Oh for—let me,” said Quistis. She rapped professionally a few times and said, “We’ve been assigned to the mission.”

Silence. Then some scratching sounds. Then the sound of Cid drawing the bolt. The door opened to show his face through a crack.

“That’s a bit below your paygrade,” he told them, ultra-seriously. “It’s just a few sinkholes. But I have complete faith in you! And of course I’m very flattered you've come all this way just to help me. Help yourselves to the spare rooms in the orphanage. See you tomorrow; we can discuss it then.”

Then he closed the door again and didn’t open it after that. They circled his house, a small, rambling bungalow Garden had flown out for him as a retirement gift, so that he and Edea wouldn’t have to rebuild their shabby orphanage, and so that they could have a nice spot away from adoring crowds (mostly for Cid) and angry mobs (mostly for Edea).

Cid had drawn all the curtains and locked the back door.

They retreated to the orphanage. Squall was pissed; Quistis was carefully neutral; and Zell wanted to ask about the sinkholes, because he’d only joined the mission as an afterthought – technically he still had vacation time – and he hadn’t had a spare second to take a peek at their objectives, what with Ma practically throwing him at some guy who was moonlighting at the Balamb garage.

“Xu said he was lonely!” Squall said, upset in that blank way of his that didn’t quite show on his face, but still got you feeling kinda queasy because you suspected he was about to go off his nut and do something ridiculous like cart an unconscious girl to the hidden city of Esthar just to show the world that he was pissed off and secretly brimming with romantic turmoil.

“Xu’s full of it,” Zell agreed, to pacify him. He headed towards Quistis’ pack and flipped the top open. He found the mission files. Quistis didn’t notice, because she was doing her best to talk Squall down in a mature and level-headed fashion, although if you looked at her eyes you could see that she was also annoyed by the whole thing.

“We all knew Xu was throwing us an easy mission so that she could figure out what to do about the Trepies,” Quistis said. “It was a favor to me, really.”

“She’s unfair,” Squall said. “She does personal favors for her best friends. Not objective at all. And then she—“

“I don’t know that getting rid of the Trepies would be just for my benefit,” Quistis hedged. “Or that I’d call her my best friend.”

Zell tuned them out and flipped through the file. There wasn’t a lot to flip through.

 **Re: Sinkholes in the Kashkabald**  
Referred to: Arismendi, Xu  
Client: Kramer, Cid  
Objectives: Figure out what the heck is causing sinkholes in the Kashkabald  
Client Comments: It’s v. worrisome! We planned to retire to Centra and now there are these sinkholes!!! What if they spread to our land??? Thanks kids. By the way you are doing a great job. HEADMASTER CID

Seriously?

 _Seriously_?

“She’s actually really intense,” Quistis was saying. “All she does is read and play Triple Triad, and read some more. And she’s married to her work. I mean, what a nice girl. But so intense. Too intense.”

Squall looked like this was doing absolutely nothing to improve his mood. Zell decided to interrupt.

“The Kashkabald isn’t even anywhere _near_ here,” Zell said.

“What?” said Quistis. 

“This mission,” Zell said. “It’s bull. The Kashkabald is on the other side of the continent. Where no one lives.”

Quistis and Squall blinked at him.

“Yeah,” Squall said. “So what? It’s a favor for Cid.”

Doing favors for friends was right out with him, but apparently Cid was a different story.

“It might destabilize the continent,” Quistis added. “You know, down the line. In a seismic way.”

That was not in keeping with what Zell had learned about seismic activity, but since Quistis had been an instructor and all and probably knew more than him, he let it slide.

“Say it might. That would probably be years from now,” Zell said. “Why ask SeeD to investigate it now?”

“Cid likes to prepare?” Quistis said. “He spent, what, more than a decade prepping for Ultimecia? Building up Garden just for that?”

“So now he wants to prepare for Centra to get swallowed up by a massive sinkhole?” Zell flipped the down the top of her pack in disgust. “What can we do about that, anyway? Come _on_.”

“Well,” Quistis admitted. “He may know more than he’s letting on. It does seem a little silly.”

“We don’t ask questions,” Squall put in suddenly.

“What?” said Zell.

“We’re _SeeD_ ,” said Squall. “We do our jobs. No questions.”

Zell looked at Quistis. Quistis looked at Zell.

Neither of them was really into contradicting Squall. Selphie might have said something. Rinoa might have gently hinted. Irvine might have at least offered a pensive and questioning look in Squall’s general direction. But Zell and Quistis? They didn’t have it in them to go against Squall.

Both of them had once had massive crushes on him, for one thing.

And for another: he was the leader. He'd just kind of effortlessly assumed the position. And he was more imposing than he knew. And he was right, actually. About SeeD, and what they were meant to do. That was how they had defeated Ultimecia and saved the world, right? No questions. Just getting the job done.

Squall fingered his gunblade.

“Typical Cid,” he muttered. “We’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

-

“Oh, dear,” Cid told his patient. “I didn’t think they’d send this bunch.”

His patient coughed up some blood. They said, “Dollet.”

“Soon,” Cid said. “I’ll find some way to distract them tomorrow morning. We’ll get you out while they’re occupied.”


	4. Chapter 4

They took the train to Deling City even though Selphie wanted to take the Ragnarok. Selphie always wanted to take the Ragnarok, actually, but they couldn’t do that without attracting attention anymore. It was a highly conspicuous vehicle and they were highly conspicuous people. So Rinoa and Irvine talked Selphie down to train travel. She loved trains. She loved most things in the world. As the old Dolletian saying went: she danced with the joy of life.

Irvine, by contrast, was kind of sadsack. But liked to think that this didn’t mean Selphie liked him any less. The Timberi frontier poet and sometime-chemist Reo Wenwist used to write extensively on this phenomenon—

(And cut Irvine some slack here; yes, he’d read the guy. He wasn’t a nerd or anything, but he’d grown up poor in Deling City, unable to afford tonberry dust. So for the first few years of his life, he’d read. Mostly naughty magazines. But when he found himself in a library by some strange act of fate, then other stuff too, because libraries didn’t stock naughty magazines.)

—and Wenwist described every interaction as a potential attraction of opposite charges. The more…Oh, Irvine was no poet. He figured you could call it opposite-y? The more opposite-y that the charges were? The more opposite-y they were, the more they attracted each other. This phenomenon wasn’t simply for tiny particles and subcutaneous organisms. It applied all across the board, a law of Hyne. Oppositea attracted. And Irvine and Selphie were opposites. Irvine had no inner joy to speak of, not any that wasn’t a front; underneath his breezy airs and good looks he sometimes felt he was a negative, a big old void. While Selphie was brimming with positivity. It charged her up and made her a brilliant, happy, bouncing, energetic being; she couldn’t even keep it inside her. Ergo, they’d bonded. She swapped him some of that joy for his…well. His something. Something was keeping her with him. Keeping up their bond.

It had been a bond formed in the cradle, Irvine thought. Matron said Irvine had been four months old when he’d come to the Orphanage. Selphie had already been there, a little older than him. And Matron hadn’t confirmed that they’d hit it off right away, but Irvine didn’t need the confirmation. He knew they had. He just knew it was true. He wasn’t always the most intellectual soul, not even after reading all those books. But he was a secret romantic. And so some things he just took on faith.

See, aside from memories of Selphie and the orphanage; all Irvine had, really, were memories of being sort of empty and lonely by comparison. His childhood had been lonely. His training had been lonely. Even his first time had been lonely. Irvine had lost his virginity at almost fourteen, and he figured it had to have been loveless sex – not great sex, not yet; that would have been unrealistic. He’d been too young, and he'd met a Galbadian soldier – tall, for a woman, with bright eyes and powerful arms. She’d been guarding some diplomat who was meeting with Martine, only guarding him rather half-assedly, letting the guy wander the Garden while she herself sprawled on the couch in the waiting area, and there she’d seen Irvine, skinny but tall for his age, stewing because he’d been sent to the Headmaster’s office. Again.

“You look like you’re being held captive. What’d you do?” she’d asked.

And Irvine had said, “Nothing.”

“Everybody says that,” the soldier had said, waving a hand like she understood well the follies of youth. “If you’d done nothing, you wouldn’t be here. You did something. Probably with a girl, right? Let some cute young thing into your heart, like a fool.”

Irvine _had_ done that, actually. The girl had been named Selphie Pardo when he’d let her into his heart and no one had ever told him who her adoptive parents had been, so he wouldn’t have been able to track her down as a Tilmitt even if he’d tried to. That was how it had gone horribly wrong. Separate families, in the end. Separate continents. But Irvine hadn’t been about to reveal any of that. Not to some random Galbadian soldier who was only flirting. Irvine had already understood flirting at the time; he’d been a quick learner.

Irvine had said, “No. I did nothing. Just nothing. No shooting people. No shooting grats, even. No GFs.”

He’d been enrolled at Garden under extreme duress. His adoptive father, Bexley Torr, had liked that they farmed their graduates out to the Galbadian army and had steamrolled over most of Irvine’s protests.

The soldier had thought Irvine’s natural squeamishness naïve, which it had been, and cute, which it hadn’t been. So the first encounter was probably fairly uncomfortable; not enough to put Irvine off of sex completely, but somehow enough to make him shove the memory at the GFs, later on. He and the soldier had still exchanged contact information, and met near the Deling City Hotel for next three months, and she’d blown him beneath the underpass near the Presidential Palace.

Irvine couldn't remember her name.

He’d given the name up when he’d finally agreed to junction. And the memory of his actual first time. There were other memories he’d preferred to keep, things more important than an act he’d do again and again and only get better at. That was fine. Irvine had known he might lose stuff to the GFs.

Now, Irvine had told his friends that he hadn’t junctioned GFs until meeting them. It wasn’t _strictly_ true. He hadn’t junctioned for real battle until meeting them. He hadn’t junctioned for especially long periods until meeting them. He hadn’t junctioned enthusiastically, surrounded by living reminders of a past that he was in danger of losing, until meeting them. But meeting them had not been his first time. Er. His _other_ first time. His GF first time.

Irvine'd had some previous experience with GFs; that was how he’d known they caused memory loss, right off the bat. He just hadn’t wanted to admit how he’d known. It wasn't a terribly nice story. In the first place, it involved a lot of selfish forgetting. Not like Selphie and Zell and Quistis and Squall’s inadvertent memory loss. But a deliberate, manipulative forgetting on Irvine’s part.

And in the second place, it mostly revolved around how much of a lonely loser he’d been growing up. 

The story goes as follows:

The upper-level, more talented cadets at G-Garden had been weird and alien from the start. After a few months Irvine had realized why: they didn’t have memories. Some lost their childhoods; parents were constant surprises they rediscovered in the mail every week. Others lost what they’d eaten the day before; they experienced for the first time the same Deling cafes over and over. And some lost their first memory of meeting Irvine, again and again, and looked at him strangely whenever he was familiar with them. And, with some pestering, an instructor finally took Irvine aside and told him why all this was happening.

GFs.

G-Garden didn’t have many. On paper, they had no GFs, because Cid Kramer was paranoid about that stuff. Martine drilled it into them in case they ever came into contact with Cid’s kids: “Don’t let them _know_. Tell them we have _none_. “

Why?

Because GFs meant power. And when Cid down in Balamb caught wind that G-Garden had stumbled on some new source of power, he inevitably decommissioned that power for use by his own kids. He said it was because Galbadia Garden had always been meant to focus more on technology than magic. But GFs had their uses in the realm of technology, too. Some could help refine weapons components. Some, particularly those found in the desert near G-Garden, were weapons themselves – the magic one got from them was weak at best, but when they unfurled their bodies all one saw was a vast wall of mech. And some boosted physical strength and rolled out a shield against magic; these were particularly prized by Martine, as he saw in them the key to defeating Cid’s kids, should it ever come to that.

Irvine had passed his physical tests perfectly, so if he could have been browbeaten into accepting the GFs, he might have been a useful asset. Consequently, Martine had come after him mercilessly for refusing to practice with the GFs. Irvine had held out for a while. Then, he stumbled onto Florlina Drinnaks’ _. Not a naughty magazine, like most of his light reading. Just a book. But a useful one._

Drinnaks saw GFs not as strange memory suckers that took up space in your brain. To her, they were more than that. They were almost people. GFs could think, apparently. They could be offended. They could challenge you, and judge you for being weak.

There was something _to_ them, like with people.

Irvine wasn't good at making people really care about him; he only could charm them, keep their attention on him for temporary periods, that was all. But as a cadet he’d only junction the GFs for temporary periods. So that was all he needed. When, on pain of eternal detention, Martine had talked Irvine into letting one Zona Seeker into his brain, Irvine had taken a deep breath, cleared his mind completely (he’d run through this so many times in anticipation of junctioning that it was instinctive; it had to be), junctioned, and thought his first thoughts in the GF’s direction.

“Don’t take my memories.”

Florlina Drinnaks said this almost never worked straight out. You had to be junctioned to them for a while, so that they obeyed your commands effortlessly, in order for it to work. And by then, of course, they would have already taken your memories – maybe even your memory that GFs could take memories.

Zona Seeker’s physical form had a ribcage made of metal, and in its mental form its voice came forth sounding very tinny and high for such a forbidding beast.

_What…are…memories?_

Right. Not promising.

“Like, my knowledge of what I did before now. For example, what I did this morning—“

And as soon as that had popped into his brain, there went his memory of the morning: no doubt brushing his teeth, pulling on his uniform, eating by himself in the caf. He still had the memory of the memory, of course. The knowledge that it had been there and he had done _something_. But the events themselves? Gone. Irvine had realized he would have to try a different tactic. What else did he have?

Oh. Gab. Charm.

“You seem like you’re being held captive. What’d you do?”

_Are…you…mocking…me?_

_…_

_Fool!_

_Do…you…know…my…power?_

“Not as such,” Irvine had thought evenly, making sure to keep calm. Breathe in, breathe out. He’d trained himself not to be nervous.

There was no reason to be, after all. He’d studied up on everything Drinnaks had to say about bargaining with GFs. So he was reasonably sure that he was on the right track. “I really wanna know. I can relate. I’m stuck here myself. At G-Garden, I mean. I don’t wanna be here; you couldn’t pay me to go into the Galbadian Army.”

_…Coward._

Zona Seeker had been a fairly powerful GF, but no prize in the personality department.

“No, really,” Irvine had thought. “We’re gonna be stuck running drills together, aren’t we? We might as well get to know each other. What’s your story?”

 _I…don’t know_.

“You don’t need to get creative with it or anything. Just give me a name—“

_Zona Seeker…_

“Okay, not that. I already know that. Parents? Loved ones? GFs you’re close to?”

 _I….don’t know_.

“You don’t have parents?” Irvine let slip a few memories of Bexley Torr as a reference. And as bait.

_Bexley…_

_Very stern…_

_He was taller than me._

_Now he isn’t anymore._

_I don’t like him_.

“Right,” Irvine had thought. “Here’s the thing. Bexley’s not yours, my friend.”

_He is!_

Florlina Drinnaks believed – correctly, as Irvine had come to discover – that something had made the GFs complete and total amnesiacs. GFs had no memories of their own. They were straightforward creatures, and memory was, after all, not straightforward. It was your brain playing tricks on you. Imperfectly recreating something you could never get back. But GF brains couldn’t recreate; they could only steal. Consequently they were all impulse; their identity was just whatever they happened to be feeling at the time; and what a lot of them felt was hungry for memories. For a better identity.

Why else would they help you so much, stick by you, once junctioned to you? If you kept them with you long enough, guided them into learning enough new abilities, they stole away so much of you in order to build themselves that after a while they almost thought they _were_ you.

They didn’t steal memories on purpose. They just came to believe your memories were really theirs.

Which made defending your memories tricky.

“Fine. He’s yours. Tell me more about him,” Irvine had thought. And had focused right away on his breathing. On the crack in the wall of the training center changing room. On his fingernails. On the wool socks he’d taken off before drills and stuffed into his formal boots. On the athletic socks and regulation boots on his feet.

On anything but Bexley Torr. 

_I…I can’t_.

 _I don’t know anything more_.

He still couldn’t think of Bexley, not yet. So Irvine had focused on the showerheads. He’d counted the holes in the nearest showerhead.

“Do…”

The tiles. Irvine sketched out a mental copy of the pattern on the tiles.

“You…”

The uneven wood bench, painted a dull G-Garden brick red. Irvine counted the grains in the wood.

“Want to…”

The pipes beneath the sinks. Irvine followed their loops from the sink to the wall, from the wall to the sink.

“Know…”

The creak of door as another trainee came in and headed for the lockers. Creak, creak, creak. Irvine had replayed it in his mind. GFs could only hit what you were thinking of right then. They couldn’t go deeper. Thank Hyne.

“More?”

 _Yes_!

So Irvine let it slip. Bexley, berating him. Bexley, offhandedly praising him. Bexley in Deling City, in the Desert, in his office at the D-District, where he oversaw prisoner transport. Bexley, Bexley, Bexley. Bexley explaining that he'd only adopted Irvine at the urging of his wife, Aurora Kinneas, and then Aurora (nice, pretty, joyful like Selphie; but Irvine didn’t want to think too much about her, because he didn’t want to risk losing her) had died in a prisoner riot, and Bexley had discovered Edea Kramer’s no takebacks policy.

So they’d been stuck together. Bexley with the kid. Irvine with his (second) dead mom’s surname, per Galbadia continent matrilineal custom. This was fine; he didn’t want to be named after Bexley anyway.

_I do not wish to be named after him!_

_He hit me once!_

_He--_

_How did you_ do _that?_

“That’s a memory,” Irvine had said. “Mine. Not yours. But it’s delicious, right?”

 _Filling_.

 _I am someone_.

 _I am you_.

 _We are_ connected.

And, Hyne damn him if it hadn’t been weird, but at that Zona Seeker had sounded almost blissful. 

“Do you want more?” Irvine had said. “I’m not stingy.”

_Yes!_

“Alright. Let’s work out a deal, then.”

And that had been the start of the bargain. Nice memories? Zona Seeker could peek at them. But no claiming them. No taking them to wherever the hell it happened to store human-like thoughts, out of his reach. It could take the bad or distasteful ones whenever it felt like it, though. It wasn’t like it minded. A bad identity was still an identity. And GFs didn’t seem to conceive of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ the same way normal people did, anyway.

All the same, this was why Irvine figured his first time must not have been particularly good. He couldn’t quite remember it. But he could remember telling Bismarck – the second GF he ever junctioned – that little Sefie from the orphanage was off-limits, but this chick? The soldier here? She didn’t mean much. It had been an empty experience. Whatever her name was.

Irvine could remember knowing her name, at this point. But he couldn’t remember the name itself.

 _You have lost things. We make you lose them. This is why I cannot take your memories_ , recited Siren, in the present.

Irvine went over this with her every time he junctioned her. Once they left you, the GFs couldn’t retain much. They went back to being all impulse. Sometimes they took your lost memories with them, which really worried him, especially since it was a useless endeavor; they couldn’t seem to access them once outside the human brain.

“This,” Irvine reminded her, “Is why you can’t take without asking first. Unless it’s bad. Or useless. Pain. One night stands. That kind of thing.”

Selphie, verifying their train passes with the station attendant, turned to look at him. She knew by now that he bargained with the GFs in his mind. Irvine could see her making a face at Rinoa about it; she was torn over it. On the one hand, Irvine often took a long long time standing there talking with his GF, and it seemed to take something out of him. She'd told him that she’d always just accepted GFs, hadn’t worried about memory loss, and she’d been fine. No bargains needed. It seemed to her like a lot of unnecessary stress that Irvine was throwing on himself.

But on the other hand, Selphie hated not knowing things. She was determined to learn and master his GF-bargaining trick on principle, even if she was doing fine with storing memories in her online diary and even if she could never seem to clear her head the way he could. Teaching her was uphill going. Particularly since every time she asked after the memories he'd traded away to his GFs, he had to come up with something other than ‘recollections of my asshole father’ and ‘people I have slept with who aren’t you.’

 _You think you will forget the one night stands anyway_ , Siren noted, skimming the surface of his thoughts.

“Well, and also it’s good for me not to have them,” thought Irvine. “People asking for paternity tests, that kind of thing.”

Since he thought of paternity tests, Siren thought of paternity tests, and understood for the first time what they were, and then she sent him a flash of disapproval – she was a very human GF in more ways than her form. She didn’t need to get really verbal and specific, so much as project her emotions at you in a judgey way if she damn well felt like it.

“I always submit to the paternity tests! Sometimes I pay for them. And none of them has ever come back positive,” Irvine protested.

Irvine was a big believer in just about every form of contraception under the sun. He was a good Garden boy like that.

“Don’t take my memories of how to use contraceptives,” he warned Siren. “I need those.”

 _But you did not need the name of your first love_.

“Right,” Irvine thought. “What? No. Not a love. Just a woman.”

The insinuation that he might have loved someone other than Selphie stunned him; he didn’t like it. He actually started, right there in the station, and Rinoa, who was buying magazines from the platform seller, caught sight of this and raised an eyebrow.

 _How would you know?_ said Siren smugly. _You traded away your memories of her_.

“That’s exactly why she can’t be my love,” Irvine argued. This was the problem with Siren. No identity didn’t mean no personality. And her personality was even worse than Zona Seeker’s had been.

 _Perhaps it ended poorly, and you removed the wounds she left_.

Oh, now there was a disturbing thought.

 _Yes. I think so as well_.

“I don’t even know her name,” said Irvine.

Only then, suddenly, he did.

 _Rill Tremlett_ , Siren noted.

It had flashed across his mind very unexpectedly. It was on the cover of the magazine Rinoa had bought. She’d bought more than a few. And one, one of the gossip rags that had sprung up in the wake of the war to pollute the old _Timber Maniacs_ market, came with the headline:

**Garden Sharpshooter: Loose and Lurid?  
Former Lover Rill Tremlett Tells All!**

The rest of the cover was a pastiche of photos: a photo of Rill; some blurry pictures of Irvine in FH, “terrorizing the locals”; and a brief caption that noted that he was supposed to be dating Trabia Garden survivor and fellow hero Selphie Tilmitt. Supposed to be. But he probably wasn’t being faithful, was the insinuation. There was also a photo of a teenage Irvine in the lower left, near the pricing mark. Teenage Irvine wasn't wearing very much. In small red letters, the magazine promised more inside. But probably not any more _clothes_.

“Fucking Hyne,” Irvine said, too stunned to say anything more.

“You should see the ones about me,” Rinoa muttered.

Selphie caught up to them by this point. She grabbed the magazines out of Rinoa’s hands. She said, furiously, “Trabia Garden Survivor Selphie Tilmitt. Homeless Refugee Selphie Tilmitt. Poor Little Mourning Selphie Tilmitt. Adel’s Tits! Why do you buy this stuff?”

“I want to know what they’re saying about me,” Rinoa said defensively.

Irvine still hadn’t found any words.

He was pretty sure he was _thirteen_ in that one picture of him.

Sure, people said stuff, and had been saying stuff about him all his life. But this. This was—this was—

Siren put it better than he could have. _Can I have this memory? The one you’re laying the groundwork for right now?_ she said. _I ask only because it doesn’t seem to be shaping up to be a good one_.

-

Selphie had once loved trains, but now she hated them.

Trains meant traveling incognito. Why? Because suddenly everybody knew who they were. They’d gone and unthinkingly saved the world, and now there were reporters everywhere. In her parents’ yard in Trabia. At destroyed Trabia Garden. In Esthar. Everywhere but B-garden, really, since Xu didn’t tolerate the press coming onto Garden without an invite and had resorted to creative means to drive them away (dangerous cadet drills near the exits, and “escaped” malboros and stuff).

Irvine and Rinoa said the Ragnarok was conspicuous? Please.

 _They_ were conspicuous. Them. Selphie, Irvine, Rinoa, Squall, Quistis, Zell. People were suddenly interested in knowing everything about them and making it up when they didn’t know. Photographers had taken to stalking the Garden cars when it seemed like one of the group might be traveling. This, predictably, interfered with their missions. And had led to Xu practically throwing their week of vacation time in their faces as soon as she could spare them; there were only so many paparazzi invasions the Headmistress could deal with.

Fine. Whatever, as Squall would say. They’d take vacations. They’d make themselves scarce, practically invisible. Rinoa would remove her trademark highlights and chop off half her hair, swap her clothes. Irvine and Selphie would do the same; the latter no longer a byword for flashy desert menswear, instead traveling in a simple cap and black slacks, and the former would wear boring green shorts instead of her pretty yellow dress.

But people still squinted at them on the station platform like they could figure out who they were. And pestered them like they were entitled to know everything about them. Honestly, why had they bothered saving the world anyway? Now the world wouldn’t leave them alone. The world _sucked_.

As if to punctuate this, the train shuttered pitifully into the station, seeming pathetic after Esthar’s superior airship technology. Selphie shoved the magazines under her arm wrathfully, and said, “Let’s board. You can look at these once we’re in our car.”

She strode off, practically tossing their tickets at the conductor. Rinoa and Irvine dutifully followed.

“Can I—“ Irvine said, as soon as they were inside. He seemed flustered. “Can I—um. One of those. I need to see it.”

“I wish they'd stop writing about your ex-girlfriends,” Selphie told him, a little ruthlessly. She sorted through the magazines for whichever one had his name. “I like to pretend you never ever had any other lovers. Ever.” She itched to blow something up. Truth was – when you were furious, nothing blew off steam better than the Ragnarok’s high-octane flight and ability to generate explosions. Their journey fighting Ultimecia had taught her that. But all around them there was nothing to blow up. Nothing but train, and you couldn’t blow up a train when you were riding on it. “I mean, I know you did have lovers. But I’m more jealous and spiteful than I ever thought I was. And when I think about them I want to kill them. So, you know. Pretend.”

Ah. There it was. Another jilted ex for Irvine. Another sleazy headline. Another—wait.

Oh, Hyne. _Irvy_.

“How old are you in this picture?” Selphie said.

“Young,” Irvine said uncomfortably.

Selphie handed the magazine over. Rinoa caught sight of it as she did so.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t notice that picture when I— I mean. The first article really upset me. These do too. But I just buy them all now, as a matter of habit, almost, so—“

“It’s fine,” Irvine said quickly. “It’s not like you printed the thing.”

But someone had. Someone had seen quick cash in it and gone right ahead. And someone – something Tremlett, from what Selphie could read from here; Irvine was scanning the article anxiously and had part of the headline blocked off with his hand – had taken the picture in the first place, and then delivered it to the papers.

Something Tremlett was a dead woman.

Selphie was going to hunt her down and blow her up. Lots of times. In small pieces. After she cut off the pieces. After she beat her black and blue.

“Can I see it when you’re done?” she asked Irvine. “Not – not if you’re not comfortable.”

He brought the magazine down and looked at her for a good few seconds. She couldn’t read his expression; that was one of the things she liked least about him. She couldn't read his expression anymore. Selphie vaguely remembered him being a lot more open at, like, age five, but these days he was a closed book.

“Sure,” he said eventually. “Let me finish first, though.”

Then the magazine went back up, blocking his face. While she waited for him to finish, Selphie arranged the others on the floor. Just to get a good look at them all: the full picture. Then she could plan. They had to do something about their level of media exposure. They’d been ignoring it, hoping it would blow over. She’d been ignoring it. A longtime journalism fan, Selphie had found herself suddenly retreating, uncomfortable, from the world’s magazines and newspapers. Firstly because it was weird to see herself listed there alongside the Card Queen and other genuine media personalities. And secondly because she hadn’t seen any reason to keep tabs on this stuff; she herself hadn’t even been a major target until recently, not like Squall or Rinoa.

For a few reasons. 1. Selphie was friends with most people; most people didn’t have anything really bad to say about her. 2. Selphie was considered the member of the group with the saddest backstory, a genuine Trabia Garden survivor, entitled to moments of private mourning (the assumption was that she was always mourning; the public didn’t like to think of her not mourning; that would have been tasteless of her). And 3. Selphie was actually, once you got your hands on video footage of her limit breaks, downright _terrifying_.

But then the foundations of the new Trabia Garden were unveiled. And suddenly, quite without warning, the papers had decided they needed to revive their mourning heroine.

**Selphie Smiles (Through Her Tears?)  
** ”Tilmitt Has Already Moved On!” Says Trabia Refugee, Of Callous Classmate  
Tilmitt Seeks Solace From Tragedy In Arms Of Garden Womanizer  
”Our Selphie Will Never Heal The Hole In Her Heart,” Say Trabia Friends 

Selphie had always been a big believer in the freedom of the press. She collected Timber Maniacs, after all. She had several blog posts up about the revolutionary role the paper had played in shaping the politics of the Galbadian continent. She didn’t hate free speech, not really.

She just hated that her grief – and her boyfriend, apparently – were now public property.

Rinoa had it even worse. Half of the world despised her on principle: she was a sorceress. Of the other half, Galbadia despised her because she was an open supporter of Timber independence; and parts of Timber hated her because it had come out that she’d been raised on General Caraway’s dime. Winhill had suddenly taken a proprietary interest in Squall. So they hated her because she was, according to the Deling City Mirror, not nearly good enough for him. 

Dollet’s gays and lesbians rather liked her: sorceresses, as social outcasts, had long been cultural icons for some of that set. And Rinoa had always shown them support anyway. But, judging by the letters to the editor published in the Dollet Daily Press after their **Heartilly: Doomed to Become Ultimecia?** article, absolutely everyone else in Dollet felt it was irresponsible of Garden not to kill her where she stood.

In light of all this, it was understandable that Rinoa now collected all the media she could lay her hands on. It gave her some inkling of where the next death threats were going to roll in from, for her _and_ Squall.

Some of the world still saw Squall as a hero. But the truth was: he didn’t have what it took to be a media darling. He just didn’t. Squall’s personality was 85% rude silence, 13% cutting remarks, and 2% unthinkingly throwing over everything else in his life for his girlfriend. And the world was starting to catch on. Timber, which was grudgingly in favor of him because Galbadia hated him, was starting to put out articles like: **Does Leonhart Hinder the Cause of Timber Independence?** Squall was only tangentially connected to Timber independence; he was the Garden muscle that happened to be dating its driving force. But that was more than nothing. And they had a point. He had a tendency to piss off Galbadian diplomats over nothing. He had a wry rejoinder for every oblique insult, and dished up stubborn silence when it came time to negotiate. Squall was a terrific commander. But not a very good politician.

The rest of the Galbadia continent feared that he’d team up with Laguna to conquer them. Some reporter had discovered the connection between Squall and Laguna three months ago, and now no one would stop talking about it. Except, of course, Squall. Squall wouldn’t go near Esthar if you offered him a million gil. Xu had actually done this by attempting to assign him many a mission there, only to have rank pulled on her and the missions flatly denied.

For their part, the Esthar populace were beginning to suspect that Squall would be making overtures at Galbadia in an attempt to conquer _them_. Esthar had very free press laws. So the Esthar Independent, with no one from Laguna’s office moving to stop them, had published a hugely popular op-ed arguing that Squall might any day now wrench the Estharian presidency away from his father. The thrust of it seemed to be that Squall wanted retaliation for all those years Laguna had been a deadbeat dad. The Independent intimated that Laguna had maybe abandoned his son deliberately (which was untrue. Sir Laguna would _never_ ), and probably deserved it. But ultimately the paper had concluded that the father would be a better president than the son. Laguna was cheery and approachable. Squall was grim and threatening.

Irvine, of course, had all those newspaper articles on his sexual dalliances. When he handed the latest over so that Selphie could add it to her pile, she got to check that – yes – they still believed him to be currently sleeping his way across the Esthar continent. Still likely possessed of every sexual disease under the sun. Almost certainly in your backyard, about to seduce your son and daughter. To read it, Irvine was a worldwide menace, a sexual threat putting the world on high alert, and besides this, like the rest of them, he seemed arrogant, too aware of his role as a world hero. And he’d made no friends at G-Garden, which was suspicious and pointed to severe deficiencies in his character. His own father, claimed the paper, was reputed to dislike him.

Quistis’ parents, by contrast, had informed the Fisherman’s Horizon Gazette that they were very proud of her. They’d also had their pictures taken in the Dollet Inquirer, and had won a lucrative contract with the Dollet radio tower to talk about her every Sunday from three to four. They chided her publicly for her clothing choices and failure to send home enough of her paycheck; described in detail her beauty and sad luck with men; waxed rhapsodic about their close family connection to her; and despaired that perhaps she was making the wrong friends. They didn’t seem to approve of the rest of the group: all rude people and loose men and sorceresses. This was probably why Quistis never, ever mentioned them to her friends; and in fact lived life as though her parents didn't exist.

Which didn't stop them from snagging the cover of this week’s Timber Times: **”My Beautiful Daughter Needs A Man!” Cries Mrs. Trepe. “Sometimes I Worry That She’s Frigid!”**  
.  
Of all of them, only Zell had really escaped the media blitz. Balamb had run a local interest piece on him right after the war. But Balamb was an unpretentious town; it had just been a brief note underneath his picture at some long-ago birthday party, approximately age eight. It had been squished onto on page three of the weekly broadsheet. **Our Zell Dincht Of Main Street Who Helped Save The World Last Week; Good For Him! Mother Is Proud**. And the Trabia Chronicle had listed him as one of the B-Garden alums who’d dropped by to support the rebuilding a few months ago. But aside from that, the papers seemed to think he was a nice Balamb boy; but boring, with no great tragedies in his past, unlikely to snap and kill his biological parents in a bloody coup; and, worst of all, not even dating anyone. One of the smaller news sources out in Dollet had run an article about the Library Girl last week. Zell’s mother had written them a strongly worded note as soon as the edition hit the streets, they’d published it and apologized, and the whole thing seemed to have died down. Zell hadn’t even had to change his appearance much. People genuinely had no idea he was _that_ Zell Dincht, even with Zell Dincht being an extremely rare name.

Zell didn’t make a single showing in anything Rinoa had collected from the newsstands.

How did he do it?

“Zell’s looking good this week,” Irvine said, looking at the spread on the floor. 

“The perks of being well-adjusted and boring,” Selphie told him, trying to comfort him. 

“Zell’s just a very good person,” Rinoa said. She patted Angelo distractedly – Angelo always traveled with her. People didn’t like telling her she couldn’t take her dog on trains because she was a sorceress and sorceresses tended to be terrifying, so here the dog was. Rinoa added, “If we’re going to gossip about him, I’d prefer that we be kind about it.” But then she crouched down to get a better look and saw that a publication in Trabia, of all places, was declaring her **The Terror of Timber**. So she added, “It must be nice for him to not be a sorceress, though.”

“He’s also not as good looking as you,” Selphie told Irvine.

“Probably really wonderful for him to have parents who are completely un-military and have never once tried to take over other countries,” said Rinoa.

“And his friends are all alive,” Selphie said.

“And you’d think people would make more noise about him, because everyone knows him,” said Irvine.

“That is so annoying,” said Selphie, hypocritically getting into the swing of things. “I hate people like that.”

“No one ever forgets about him,” Irvine said. “It’s like: oh, there’s Zell. Can’t miss Zell.”

“Hometown boy, Zell,” said Selphie, “Totally Still Has An Intact Hometown Zell.”

“Has A Living Mother Who Loves Him Zell,” said Rinoa.

“Team player, Zell!” said Irvine. “No Trouble Relating To People, Zell!”

“That’s wasted on him,” Rinoa pointed out, “Because he never uses his social ability for political good. I mean, you don’t see him liberating Balamb—”

Fun as the rag-on-Zell session was, here Selphie felt she had to be objective.

“In his defense, only like two people have ever tried to take over Balamb. All you’d gain would be SeeDs for neighbors, some pet Fastitocalons, and a lot of fish. It would be more of a headache to control than Timber, and it's less strategically beneficial than FH.”

“Still!” Rinoa said, tracing **Terror of Timber** with one pale blue nail. “They invited him to be on the Balamb Municipal Committee! To be a force for change! And do you know what he said?”

“’No, thanks. Cuts in on my T-boarding time,’” Irvine said.

“Zell!” Rinoa finished glumly.

There was silence for a minute. The silence meant they had time for a little bit of guilt to sneak into their minds.

“Okay, he probably didn’t deserve that,” Rinoa said. She got up and sat back in her seat, looking sheepish.

“Yeah. It just felt nice,” said Selphie.

“Still,” said Irvine, “Now that we’ve gotten the Seifer Almasy out…”

That did more to make them all feel guilty than the silence ever had. Because Zell _was_ a good person. Well-adjusted. Beloved by his parents. Just a lucky guy all around, really. And it was only deeply troubled, arrogant assholes that picked on him; everybody knew that. Deeply troubled, arrogant assholes who somehow escaped completely the consequences of their actions. And who, after a few headlines spotting them fishing in FH and a few op-eds calling for their death, had faded from the newspapers completely.

“Now there’s a disappearing act,” Selphie muttered.

“Now there’s cosmic _unfairness_ ,” said Rinoa. “If anybody should be called a Terror of Anything—“

“Everything, actually,” said Irvine. “I mean, he had his good qualities as a kid, but Terror of Everything is a more accurate way of getting the—“ Here he waved offhandedly at some spectral Seifer Almasy sitting in the corner of the train car, no doubt smirking at them and thrilled to be the topic of conversation and the star of all their resentful nightmares, “General personality across.”

He was also, randomly, Rinoa’s ex-boyfriend. Kinda. More or less. After losing touch with her, he’d gone completely crazy, betrayed the Garden that had raised him, and tried to feed her to the evil sorceress Adel. This explained the vitriol in Rinoa’s voice when she next spoke.

“I hate it. It’s so unjust. He vanishes and deals with none of the fallout. And we deal with all of it! I don’t want to talk about him,” Rinoa said. She stood very suddenly and seemed to make up her mind about something. She picked up the magazines and very deliberately crumpled them into small balls, one by one. “Do. Not. Want. To. Let’s just not. Let’s go back to Zell. Zell is nice. The world is a better place for having lots of Zells. And few Seifer Almasys.”

She lined the crumpled magazine balls up on the seat next to her; incidentally right in the place Irvine had waved at. Then she very methodically pointed a finger at each one in turn. And, in turn, each one exploded into blue flames.

Selphie looked at Irvine. Irvine looked at Selphie. Angelo looked at both of them, then whined and covered her face with a paw.

“Alright, Rinoa, whatever you want,” Irvine said carefully.

-

“You can keep a low profile when you get to Dollet, right?” said Cid. “I know your connections there are…not very low-profile, but—”

His patient coughed, but there was less blood in it than there had been before. This comforted Cid.

“Anyway, like I said, I’ll distract the kids,” Cid said. “You stay here. Get ready. I’ll throw them off. Then we’ll get you to Dollet.”

-

Raijin floated in and out of his own head.

He wasn’t sure what they'd done to him. Some kind of liquid magic. Some injection. And it meant that there were parts of him that weren’t a part of him anymore. They were visiting strange places, horrible places: a Garden that looked like a castle, an arena, a factory, the laboratories of the city of Esthar.

Someone called him back. He wished it was Fujin, but it wasn't Fujin. It was a girl with gold in her eyes and silver paint on her dark skin. A sorceress.

Raijin screamed.


	5. Chapter 5

March 18th. Centra.

They planned to see Cid at sunrise. Just to keep him on his toes and remind him that these were SeeDs he’d raised, not children he could dismiss on a whim. But then he showed up at the orphanage before they could surprise him. Looking only slightly apologetic. 

Yes, he was unreliable to the point of being rude. But wasn't unreliability just a Cid trademark?

Quistis saw him first, and good thing too, because who knew whether Squall and Zell would be able to keep their heads about it.

“That wasn’t very nice, Cid,” she told him warningly. “Squall was so excited to see you.”

Cid stared at her.

“Well,” she relented, “As excited as Squall gets.”

Cid nodded.

“I picked the right person for Commander,” he said, after a moment.

Quistis bit her tongue. He’d picked the _only_ person for Commander. It wasn’t so much that he liked Squall – she’d had to defend Squall to him more than once while acting as Squall’s instructor – it was just that Squall had been trapped in time compression. He’d shown up years ago to cue Cid’s wife into the possibility of malevolent future sorceresses, and so sometime in the past decade or so Cid had come around to the idea that Squall was destined to be Garden’s next true leader.

“Look at you, all in purple,” Cid said, jumping to a new topic with no rational explanation for why.

Cid did this often. He was disarming like that. You had to be very secure in yourself and not easily thrown off to deal successfully with him, which was why people like Xu and Squall made good administrative foils for Cid. Quistis, not so much. She’d passed her SeeD test and made the youngest instructor in the history of Garden, and then spent endless faculty meetings feeling off-balance as Cid danced around practically every point he really wanted to make.

She usually nodded along like she had no problem with this. She was too much of a people-pleaser (which in her mind she termed professionalism, but really it was people-pleasing: a need to be liked) to head Cid off and force him to talk straight. It wasn’t in her character.

“This Dollet radio show said my old outfit looked like bondage gear,” she told Cid.

“That’s not very nice,” Cid said. “I always thought you seemed so confident. And also you made me feel nervous, like I might need to beat up people who got very fresh.”

“The point was more to show that _I_ could beat up people who got very fresh,” said Quistis. “And to dare them to get fresh, so I could prove it.”

If Quistis was going to go through life insecure and off-balance, then at least she could use that. She could figure out how to turn it on others. At some point, probably while her not-parents harangued her for some imperfect score on something, she’d begun to understand that her feelings of insecurity made no sense; she really _was_ good enough. Intellectually, she knew she was. She was attractive, fast, strong, smart – everything people were supposed to be. Only just below the intellectual level, somewhere in the dark and chaotic id, she could never quite convince herself of it. So she faked it. All the better to disarm people. She had to have picked something up from Cid, after all. He _was_ her very first father figure.

“See? So confident. I knew I picked the right person for Instructor,” Cid said.

Picked and subsequently fired. But hey, why quibble?

Actually, Quistis wanted to quibble. She wanted to make him feel as uncomfortable as she felt. In the past seven months, she’d been trying something new. It was: Stop Beating Yourself Up And Do Whatever You Want. Selphie had cued her into it. Selphie was like a little sister to Quistis, and therefore the teaching should have run in the other direction. But she was also Quistis’s psychological opposite, all unbridled confidence and a complete lack of apology for anything, and as a result Selphie’s life always seemed refreshing. Selphie had probably never had a crush on Squall Leonhart; Selphie was too together to romanticize people like that. Selphie had probably never hung out with people who bored her. Selphie had her pick of friends, and few overly-aggressive groupies.

And Selphie would have told Cid to shove it where the sun didn’t shine. Selphie would have made Cid as off-balance as he made her.

On impulse, it slipped out: “What are you hiding about the Kashkabald, Cid?”

Cid stopped short.

“It must be bothering you if you’re being that direct about it,” he said. “That’s not like you.”

In for a gil, in for a full-blown weapons upgrade.

“Answer the question.”

Cid sighed. He brought his hand to the bridge of his nose and pinched it.

“You…have to see it,” he confessed. “I thought they would send some junior SeeDs, actually. This would go more smoothly with junior SeeDs. You’re all so high profile now. Magazine covers and radio shows—“

“That’s irrelevant. We’re here now. If you’re trying to get us to go back to Garden to demand Xu put new people on it; we can’t. Pulling strings like that is hardly in line with Garden procedure. You created the system; you know this isn’t how it works. So stop jumping around and just tell me.”

Cid brought a hand to the back of his neck, uneasy.

“Aaah, tell you what?” he said. “I’ll meet you there. The Egabi Crater. Four hundred meters due west from the southernmost reach of Almaj into the desert. Oh-seven-hundred.”

Quistis raised an eyebrow. “It’s not going to take us an hour and a half to get there!”

“Edea’s in Trabia,” Cid said, apropos of nothing. “She thinks she owes them for—well. You know. I should check in with her before I do anything today.”

Then he was off, surprisingly fast for a man of his age (a kind of eternal middle age; he’d seemed middle aged for as long as Quistis had known him; even those memories she could pull from her GFs revealed him as rounding about the midsection and graying fast at the temples). Whenever Cid wanted to vanish, vanish he did.

Someone behind her cleared their throat. Quistis whirled around. Squall. He didn’t say anything – he usually didn’t. The throat clearing was clearly just to alert her to the fact that he’d been watching.

So now she felt embarrassed. She couldn’t help herself. In the moment, facing down Cid, she’d felt wonderfully liberated. No longer Garden’s top good girl, but someone who could think and push and challenge: a glorious rebel. It had felt _good_. She’d never suspected that jumping outside your role, disregarding the questions you were supposed to be asking instead of the ones that you wanted to ask, could feel so good. Sometimes Quistis got snappy with people, edged around and toyed with the idea of disrespecting them, just to jump outside herself for a minute, to show that she was more than her fame and her role. But that was more for show than anything else, like her old mission gear. It was false confidence. And she only ever exercised it on people she knew she could get away with snapping at: people who wouldn’t mind, or else people who were rebellious or overconfident themselves and so wouldn’t notice.

Never at the Headmaster.

It wasn’t good SeeD behavior. Under Squall’s gaze, she understood this and felt ashamed. She felt ashamed a lot, actually; often for no particular reason, for failing to completely understand where some cadet was coming from, for being scrutinized by the Trepies all the time, for thinking she could fool the world into believing her to be competent and confident. That moment with Cid had been a nice vacation from all that shame. But it was over now.

It made no sense that Squall was always a trigger for this shame. Squall was, and had always been, fairly unrepentant himself. But she’d always been fond of him. She tried to unravel all her memories of him now, but it was hard going, because the Brothers and Diablos both were in her brain. Still, she caught a few threads. She knew that once she’d been jealous of the attention he gave Ellone. She knew that she’d wanted to be Ellone, almost. Older and poised and in charge. And Squall represented what you could have if you were like that. The complete and total adoration and attention of someone like him, someone who barely gave anyone the time of day otherwise.

You could be special.

Quistis had people telling her she was special all the time. But the truth was? She’d never really felt it, not a day in her life, not for as long as she could remember. And sure, her memory was patchy. But deep in her bones, she suspected and feared that if she could go back and pull every memory out of every GF that had ever taken one from her, she still wouldn’t find a single one in which she’d been really happy with herself.

Zell came up behind Squall at this point. He sort of squinted at the two of them – they were, after all, standing here in silence, gathering up the dust Cid had kicked off when he’d run back to his house.

“We should—“ he began.

“We’re going to the Kashkabald,” Squall said shortly. “Cid is going to meet us there at oh-seven-hundred. We’ll take some time to look around before he catches up. He seems like he’s hiding something.”

“Sure, what else is new?” Zell complained. He ducked back inside to gather their supplies.

The wave of shame came on stronger. She’d done the wrong thing. They could have interrogated Cid together, the three of them. Or they could have gotten the mission details from him cut-and-dry, pulled them out of him easily with Squall’s direct manner. They could have done _anything_ but what she’d done, which was clearly the wrong thing to have done, because she’d been the one to do it. She never knew what she was doing. 

“Good work,” Squall said. He turned and went in after Zell. Elaborating on the point wasn’t really his style.

But the compliment didn’t make her feel any better. She’d focused in on him, more than once, as some kind of barometer to measure herself by, or else as her living curaga, the one person whose attention could heal her insecurity. But when he offered her any attention it hit her like a wave breaking on the shore, receding right away and leaving only the smallest particles of comfort behind.

She carried her insecurity with her. She wished it were like a memory, that she could shove it at some GF and be done with it. But it was in her bone-deep, more than any single instance or recollection: just the sum of her by now.

-

The healer was named Farica Mossgrove. She was a sorceress. Her patient didn't trust her. This caused her no small amount of consternation. Her experiences with sorcery were very unlike Rinoa Heartilly’s and she wasn't used to people mistrusting her. Then again, she wasn't nearly as powerful as Heartilly.

Also, she was only fifteen.

She had an older sister who would come by to snipe as she worked on Raijin.

“There’s no real justice in this place,” said her sister.

Farica rolled her golden eyes, but when she spoke her voice was mild. “Please don’t let anyone hear you saying that.”

Raijin was a very big young man, but he gave her no trouble due to his size because restraining him with magic was as easily as breathing. The trouble came in the fact that they’d been messing about with magic of the most destructive kind, magic of the mind. And so she could see very clearly that sometimes Raijin wasn't in his body at all, but in other places, and in those moments he was very, very lucky that her magic, while not especially great, did have some highly specialized uses. Namely, retrieval.

Some girls could send minds whirling into different spheres, different bodies, different time zones, even.

Farica couldn't do that. She wasn't that skilled. She could only bring them back.

The problem was that every time she tried she gave Raijin a terrible fright. She was, like most sorceresses, not exactly inconspicuous. Her riotous curls contained enough elaborate headpieces to outfit ten sorceresses and her red dress was perhaps more suited to a sorceress ten years older.

“Plus they took his sister, and the other one,” remarked her sister, Renata.

Renata was useless by most people’s standards, because she lacked completely any propensity for magic. This was fairly rare. Where Raijin came from, people liked to believe that the sorceress power was a rare curse. But Farica’s people had always celebrated it as a rather common blessing. And as she didn't have it, Renata had grown up slightly odd, very rebellious, and nowhere near as calm and genteel as her sister.

“Not the other one. The Knight,” Farica told her gently.

To be a Knight was no small thing, even a failed Knight. All Knights were failed Knights. Iseult Neve, Wrolf Gunner, Jana Ki, Undine Meri. All had failed. But this didn't mean one shouldn't respect them; they’d been sorceress-touched, elevated. Until they could be useful. 

And this new Knight -- he’d been sorceress-touched by the greatest sorceress in all the world. The Last. Ultimecia.

“His name’s Seifer,” Renata said, rolling her eyes. “Not that it matters much at this point.”

As if in response, Raijin shifted violently on his cot. Farica gave her sister a warning glance.

Renata was opposed to the status quo. She had sympathy for every wretched prisoner, devoured incendiary literature, took on herself the perspective of the criminal to better understand him. But she, like most people, couldn't follow through. She only decried what had been done to Seifer Almasy in private. She burned the incendiary literature as soon as she’d read it. And she performed her job as prisoners’ warden as instructed, for all that she claimed she wanted to free her charges. And so, even if Farica had agreed with her on every point, she still would have found her sister to be only a would-be revolutionary, worthy of contempt.

Sister. There might be the key. If she could have the sister waiting here, their prisoner might be glad to see her and he might tempted to stay in his own head.

“The girl they brought in with him?” Farica said.

Renata rolled her eyes, reached into her pocket, lit a cigarette (which she _knew_ Farica hated). Then she said, “Fujin.”

“Didn’t look like him,” Farica put in, wanting to be sure Renata had her facts right.

“He called her his sister when he was being tortured,” Renata said.

“Interrogated.”

“ _Tortured_ ,” said Renata. “He said, ‘My sister!’ It was pretty clear. Maybe she was his half-sister or something. Fuck Hyne if I know.”

She said that last bit in a lower voice. It was wrong to wish ill on Hyne and she knew it. Farica wrinkled her nose and pretended she hadn't heard.

“The girl’s dead,” Renata said, blowing smoke in her face. “Gone. Bye bye, sister.”

Farica stared at her. There went her plan! And the sister had seemed strong, too. And had someone informed the Commissioner? Would _she_ have to inform the Commissioner? That didn’t seem fair. Just because someone had gone and worked a criminal to death.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Farica said, miserably. “I can’t tell this one that. He won’t come back at all if he finds out his sister’s dead. And if he doesn’t come back, then—”

“Well, then maybe someone shouldn’t have shot his veins clear through with that noxious toxin,” Renata said, with faux-agreeability.

Farica was extremely tempted to hit her with an offensive spell, only she wasn’t particularly good at offensive spells, so she didn’t bother. She just buried her head in her hands.

“Well, I’d say to bring in his friend…” Renata began.

Farica hit her. It was very sudden; Renata hadn't been expecting it. Also, since Farica had very long nails, it hurt. Renata grimaced and put a hand to the spot on her arm that now boasted three scratches, long and red.

“You know I can’t bring Sir Almasy in!” Farica said.

“Of course you can’t. He’s not here anymore,” Renata told her. "And this one probably won’t settle back in his head because you have no Hyne-damned bedside manner. Tell you what? When I come off patrol, I’ll sit with this prisoner you have. Coax him back into his head. ‘Course, they’ll only torture him again.”

“Yes, but they won’t punish _me_ ,” Farica said.

“Fair enough,” Renata said easily.

-

Garden transports were fast. They were designed to strike like lightning. So they made it to the Southern shores near the Kashkabald with time to spare, and in fact with their hour and a half, they could have jumped across the world to Deling City and still been back in time to meet Cid.

“He’s given us no info,” Zell said. “Do these sinkholes open up under you without warning? I’d like to know if I’m gonna be swallowed up by the desert.”

“You were time compressed and you survived,” Quistis said wryly. “He says it’s the Egabi crater.”

They ought to circle the thing first, though, Squall thought. Because Zell had a point. They were working with very little concrete information. Standard Cid, really.

“Keep your eyes peeled for anything out of place,” Squall told them. “We approach from the South, then circle the crater from at least five meters out. Judging from the reports on the topography, that should give us visibility of most of the crater floor. Close in as necessary, but with extreme caution. You both head along the West. I’ll take the East. We’ll cover it more quickly that way and meet to discuss on the other side.”

They saluted. They looked worried. Quistis looked the more worried of the two, but she was too professional to say anything. Zell said, “Squall, I don’t know that we should split up. Cid’s being even weirder than normal about this—”

In response Squall swung a leg over one of the motorbikes they’d pulled off the transport sub, pulled on his helmet, and started the engine. He rode off.

He didn’t feel like discussing his orders. There was no divide between friend and junior ranking officer with Zell. So Squall had to introduce a divide for the sake of missions. This was a favor he performed for Zell’s benefit as much as his own.

He was, in his own small and quiet way, pleased to have acquired a friend. Four friends. And a girlfriend. They were high-maintenance creatures, prone to irrationalities, and often completely unaware that in a non-working day Squall required at least three hours by himself, away from their constant havoc, or else they simply tired him out. But he liked them.

Still, in a working day, they could expect to see him not as a friend at all. Simply as Commander.

He surveyed the crater from where he’d stopped. It was wide and deep. The loose sand sloped down gently for about thirty five meters. Then it gave way to reddish rock that steeply jutted down to the floor of the thing, which continued on for some time. The opposite side wasn't visible from here. There were no sinkholes that he could detect. There were a few far-off cactuars dotting the chasm floor.

Squall nudged Shiva out of his brain and had her float to the edge to get a better look. She couldn’t retain much of the information for very long, but any brief snapshot she could give him was better than nothing. It took careful prodding. He'd junctioned her for so long that she believed, by now, that she and Squall were one and the same. He liked the easy loyalty that gave him, and the connectivity with her; he didn’t want to disavow her of the notion. So he'd held off on using Irvine’s bargaining techniques. Those did more than let you keep what you wanted. They reminded even long-junctioned GFs that you were something different from them and that was unpleasant. Then you felt you had an intruder in your head.

Squall held onto his memories through sheer mental willpower, the same boost the rest of them had used seven months ago, in Trabia, to recover some fragments of their time at the orphanage. You just needed a few neurons to fire, a small reminder that memories had once been there. And you had to accept that this was an imperfect system. Sometimes the memories of the memories got taken as well. Sometimes, as soon as you reminded yourself that they were there, you lost anything connected to them that you _had_ happened to retain.

But the only surefire alternative was not junctioning. And that was no alternative at all. It rendered you powerless.

Besides, ,ost people didn’t lose everything. 99% survived the junctioning experience with enough memories to not even realize they’d been changed by it. Irvine was just paranoid, hyper-cautious. Squall, for his part, didn’t mind a little risk.

Shiva floated back, tethered to him by her earthly Manifest, the ice fragment stud Squall usually kept in his left ear. It was like returning home for her. She was buzzing with mental images but they faded quickly. Squall caught nothing odder than what he was seeing himself at this distance. He started up the bike again. He needed a different angle of the crater floor.

They would have to tackle this themselves, whatever this was. Cid wouldn’t be much help. Cid rarely was. Not that Squall disrespected him or anything. It would have been hypocritical to disrespect the only man to ever give him a home. But at Garden Cid had always been peculiarly disconnected from him, not emotionally invested, even as he remained hands-on about Squall’s gunblade training, determined to teach him every angle of the assigned syllabus and more.

It had been strangely alienating.

Though it made sense now. Cid had expected to have to send Squall off to fight Ultimecia in the future; to perhaps have Squall lost in time compression, jumping from place to place, forever. And so he’d prepared Squall as best he could, while emotionally shielding himself from any grief or remorse that might result if Garden’s own sacrificial lamb didn’t survive the role Cid had carved out for him.

It was how Squall himself would have approached it, really.

_That’s horrible!_

Squall stopped the bike. Shiva. He was very aware just then that this came from her, and she sent him a little frisson of confusion, because as far as she was concerned, what came from her came from him. She was even more linked to him than Rinoa was. But she couldn’t think the way he could. She had no memories to ground her thoughts in. Right? So maybe, maybe…the thought had come from him. From somewhere deep inside him. She’d just fixated on it.

Because that was what he did think, deep down. He did think it was horrible, the way Cid had used him and the others, the way Cid had kept himself from being honest and open with them. Horrible but necessary.

Maybe.

Squall had faced up to this in his own life, after all. How holding others at arm's length could be nothing more than cowardice, nothing more than the fear that they might leave. Instead of taking a chance on them, he'd simply told himself it didn’t hurt. He wasn’t connected to them in any way, so who cared if they left? It didn’t matter.

But to discover that Cid might have thought of _him_ the same way?

That hurt.

Because he’d always trusted Cid. Always. Cid featured in the memories that he fought hardest to keep. Cid and himself and Seifer; ages thirty-something and five and six. Training. Cid and himself and Seifer; ages nearly-forty and eleven and twelve. Training some more. Cid handing him the standard psychological evaluation for junior cadets, saying, “Now, Squall, don't worry about your score on this. Whatever it is, we’ll work it out between us, you and I.” And then small, inexplicable burst of hope that even Squall hadn’t understood. Like maybe Cid meant he’d help, really help. He’d stand by Squall. 

Then a note in Cid’s hand a week later, when Squall had stopped into the infirmary for some minor scrape. Taped to the first paper on the stack of evaluations: _Disregard the notes. Clear this student for training_. It had been Squall’s paper. That was how Cid worked things out.

A few months ago, after the news about Squall’s biological father had surfaced, Cid had called in to Xu via vidscreen and caught sight of the boy he’d appointed Commander.

“Squall! You cut your hair! You look nothing like your picture in all the papers now,” he’d said. Then turned away.

That was it. That was all Squall had heard of him in the past seven months.

Cid had never let himself really like Squall once he’d learned what Squall’s role was to be, never really offered Squall any kind of human connection. And, somewhere deep inside, it made Squall furious. When Cid made stupid observations, Squall saluted perfectly and kept his mouth shut, because that was what Squall _did_ , ninety-five percent of the time. But Squall should have put down him cruelly: for shutting off any feeling he’d ever had for Squall and the rest of the orphanage gang, for keeping secrets from the children in his care, for shoving these missions and this life on them. The papers said it was Fate that had brought Squall to this point in his life, and maybe it was. But sometimes Squall wondered if ‘Fate’ came with the last name ‘Kramer.’

But Squall never did talk back to Cid, or even tolerate much rebellious talk about the man. It would have stirred up exactly all these thoughts: painful thoughts. And it was second nature to him at this point to hold his cruel conclusions and painful thoughts in. To hold every thought in. The problem was, more and more he’d begun to feel a strange new sense of discomfort in doing this. Because he wanted to say what he felt. He did.

Before making friends with Rinoa and the rest of them, it hadn’t mattered. He’d been the only possible judge of his words and thoughts and actions – the only being in the universe that counted. Maybe Seifer had come close. But only a reflection of himself, the boy who verbalized everything Squall wanted to say and then some, a strange extension of Squall; nothing more. And then Seifer had died and come back to life, and everything had changed. Squall had met new people – Rinoa, who plunged right into desert prisons to rescue people she hardly knew; and Irvine, who seemed like a cowardly creep until you got to know him; and even Laguna, who Squall couldn’t escape from, not really, not any more than he could escape from any of the difficult realities in his life.

Also, he’d seen his home nearly smashed apart. It gave him some perspective.

Suddenly, he’d realized that there were a lot more people out there, living independent and whole and separate from him, and that letting them see all of him wasn’t a bad thing. Even them _judging_ him wasn’t a bad thing, because they were in the same boat. They were alone and abandoned inside, probably even Cid was. And all most of them were doing was reaching out to get their point across, reaching out for some connection. Unafraid of the consequences.

That took guts. Guts that Squall, until recently, had not possessed. Guts that Cid probably didn’t possess even now. Men like Squall and Cid thought reaching out to others was a stupid endeavor. People were going to vanish, and they would end up alone anyway, so what was the point? But that was just it. The reaching out _was_ the point.

Squall was not a romantic. He didn't wax rhapsodic about Rinoa’s mouth. He didn’t much care about her lovely eyes (in fact, some creep at the Deling City meeting had told her her eyes were like the moon reflected on the ocean, and he’d privately found amusement in her response: “An ocean of what? Wrongfully-exported timber? My eyes are _brown_.”) He’d only liked finding, quite unexpectedly, that Rinoa was a complete person too.

She didn’t let him forget it. She was all stubbornness and strength – really, she was. People assumed otherwise, because she wasn’t SeeD, and because she couldn’t fight as well as they could. Because she babied her dog. Because she owned an alarming number of pink things. But Rinoa was someone who, in her heart of hearts, was always raising a complaint. Always determined to poke and nudge. Always had a cause – couldn't function without one, which was probably some kind of disorder, but there you had it – and who was always looking to find other people to link with, to help, to harangue, to fight for. She was always trying to connect. Invariably, at some point she’d gotten through to Squall. And that was when he’d learned that other human beings were fantastic universes, centers of judgment in their own right. And he could go through life ignoring that. Or he could come clean about what he was thinking, open up, express himself, and let them that see that he was a universe, too. He liked that latter option better. It was more courageous. And it meant he felt less alone.

Only. Just as he’d discovered this new form of courage—

Fate had plopped him into a job where courageously expressing himself didn’t matter. And in fact he was better off not doing it. He was a surprisingly sarcastic and wry person. He might now be open to making and maintaining one or two or four (no more; baby steps) friendships. But he wasn’t friendly by nature; he was kind of an asshole. He had a lot of loss and anger he’d never dealt with. Not hate, not really. He didn’t think he had it in him to hate people. He wasn’t so troubled as all that. But frustration. Pain. Abandonment.

Only professional duty demanded that he keep all that under wraps. Never express it. Play the game like Cid had, never really showing his true colors.

Now, Squall loved Garden, inasmuch as love meant ‘never had any other home and therefore would probably die for this one.’ But the fact was – the place was interfering with what he really wanted to do. Let his feelings out. Let out his inner jerk. Not a lot. Not for _everybody_ , or even for most people, because most people were still a headache. But just a little. Just to connect with the other jerks, _his_ jerks. The ones who – like Cid – had come to mean something to him in spite of himself. Just to remind them he existed; he wasn’t some walking ghost they could shove away on a whim.

Possibly he’d saved the world and come out with the wrong lesson after it. Maybe the point had been that he’d been perfect as he was, and as long as he kept on ignoring everybody he could keep his mouth shut, never bother with anyone, and that was alright. Here, Squall, see? You were a real sack of shit, an abandoned orphan with a chip on your shoulder, for upwards of ten years. But you pulled through (somehow; he still didn’t know how he’d done it), and now you’ve been rewarded. Garden Command. Now put your game face on, and shut up. We’ve got Commanding to do. Not connection.

But if he chose that, then he would lose out on all these universes: his own, and other people’s too. He would become, for lack of a better word, time compressed. Stuck in this weird state where he was the only living creature worth a damn, the center of everything, and perfectly happy to be achingly lonely.

Fuck that.

Only not, because actually that was the perfect attitude to have – oh, not for Squall the human being, trying and failing and driving Deling politicians to drink with his sarcastic retorts. But for Squall the Commander, Cid’s successor, stone-faced and alone.

He’d covered roughly a quarter of the crater’s rim by now. The Commander in him had been taking mental notes the whole time. The human being? Just sort of quietly fuming. This was permissible because the Commander hadn’t noticed anything the slightest bit odd. He’d sent Shiva to the edge a few more times. She always came back with the same mental images: chasm floors full of fat and happy cactuars.

But now he caught something in the far background of one of her visions.

Dust clouds. Not uncommon in the Kashkabald, except that these seemed more like frenzied dust tornadoes. Of thick black dust.

Squall sent Shiva back out to the edge for a second look. She went and returned. It wasn’t a fluke. Black dust and smoke in the center of the crater. He revved up the engine and rode a little ways further along the eastern side, then sent her out again, just to be sure. And found that they could be sure. The dust clouds were getting bigger. Something incredibly chaotic was happening out in the middle of the Egabi.

The Egabi was an odd formation. A giant crater in the middle of the desert, it made an almost perfect circle – no one had ever checked to be sure it wasn’t, as far as Squall knew – and it had a strange, unnatural quiet about it. To the West, the steep Almaj mountains loomed imposingly, and to the South, a brush shoreline gave way to the most chaotic stretch of sea on the planet. People didn’t thrive in the Egabi. Hadn’t since the days of the Ancient Centrans. The place was cactuar territory, home to roving creatures that escaped cactuar island and migrated to the crater for unknown biological reasons.

The crater, and all the Eastern reaches of Centra, essentially belonged to Esthar. In the bad old days of the Estharian-Galbadian War, the territory had been disputed. But Esthar had won it for the most part; the Sorceress Adel had been startlingly good at getting whatever she wanted through sheer militaristic aggression. And she’d wanted all of Centra, reputedly the ancestral home of Hyne and the sorceresses. When Esthar had closed its borders, though, all expansionist aims had been dropped. Official control of the territory was once again up in the air. Cautious settlers like the Kramers had ventured into the Western reaches of the islands and Esthar had let it be. Nowadays all the city cared about were the oilfields in the Northeast desert.

Still. Anything they found out here, they had to at least consider reporting to Laguna.

That thought put Squall in an even worse mood than before. He knew Laguna had just not known about him. A man like Laguna could never have intended to abandon him. And nothing about the way Squall’s life had turned out was really Laguna’s fault, unless you went back to his very conception, because, yes, that had been Laguna all the way. That was what fatherhood meant.

The problem was that Squall had been inside the man’s head, stuck in there like a GF, as connected as to another person as he could get.

And they had _nothing_ in common.

Laguna had never felt alone, not a day in his life. He’d been raised in a world that hadn’t even contemplated the extent of the war to come, born the cherished son of a cheerful Deling City stenographer and a Deling palace guard. He’d made fast friends with Ward and Kiros during military training (a process he’d half-assed as much as possible) and stumbled into a career buying and selling stories out of Timber, peddling his words. Laguna was fairly free with words.

The only thing he had in common with Squall was that eventually the world had decided he was born for heroism, and rewarded him accordingly with a job he didn’t like very much. But that was the thing Squall liked least about himself. He didn’t particularly want to engage in father-son bonding over the fact that he and Laguna were both ill-suited to the fates thrown on them. Fate was an asshole. It had given Squall a father who couldn't possibly understand Squall, a mismatch, a connection error.

So Squall would have Xu alert him if they found anything out here. He would keep it professional. Distant. In fact, maybe he’d have Xu alert Laguna to the existence of the crater, period. Laguna was bound to have no idea what was going on in the furthest reaches of his domain. But if someone told him, then possibly Esthar could take the whole thing off their hands.

As he rounded the edge of the crater, he considered going down there himself anyway, just to check it out. Squall was no coward. Black dust didn’t scare him. Neither did sinkholes. But a moment’s reflection quelled the impulse. That was pointless showing off: a silly, grandiose adventurer’s gesture. They had no idea what sinkholes in the Egabi pointed to; it could be nothing, though to go by Cid’s attitude something was up. But either way. Nothing said Garden had to deal with it. And if Cid thought they should, then maybe he should start pleading his case to the appropriate authorities (Squall and Xu) like every other run-of-the-mill client had to.

Squall cleared his half of the crater in an hour, then stood surveying the still-growing dust cloud as he waited for Quistis and Zell. They appeared on the horizon in a whirl of dirt and sand, and as soon as they’d parked their bikes and removed their helmets, Zell said, “Did you see? We should head down there.“

“No,” Quistis said. “No, we shouldn’t. It’s stupid. We don’t know that there’s anything to gain. It would be pointless grandstanding—“

Her vidphone went off. She held it up so they could see who was trying to reach her. Cid.

“Well, never mind. He wants us to meet him,” she said, “Down on the crater floor.”

It was still pointless grandstanding. But now it was on a client’s orders. Cid’s orders.

Squall almost wished he could say no.

-

Cid packed his patient off on a class-C Garden transport. Fast. Sleek. Painted a cheerful blue, like a fishing vessel out of FH, to disguise the fact that it had once belonged to bunch of mercenaries and had fallen into Cid’s hands only because he’d claimed it as part of his retirement package.

His patient scowled at the color. Cid blinked. He’d never understood this particular student.

“The sorceress knows all about it,” Cid said. “She can tell you more. But it’s on the peninsula. The black grounds, they call it these days. Whatever you do, don’t go for Deling City’s. You might be recognized in Deling.”

His patient’s scowl deepened. Cid fussed over the blanket, the battered grey coat underneath, the bandages. His patient waved him away. Cid programmed the transport for Dollet, then hopped off just as it pushed off from the shore.

With this done, he sent a message to Quistis.

He didn't tell the kids everything he knew about the Egabi straight off. It was nothing personal. He just worried about them getting down too quickly, figuring it out, coming back in time to stumble into the house, to see the mess and grime and blood, and all the old books Cid had dug up. Research.

This way, they’d get down into the crater slowly. They’d piece it together little by little. Squall, Quistis, and Zell were smart, so he had no doubt they’d figure it out eventually. Just not right away. And this would buy Cid and his guest some more time.

Although, come to think of it, Cid wondered if he could get them to understand, to help. There had to be a way. They were all connected. Every single one of them had a role to play. Sometimes an awful one. But still a role. And maybe they just needed to step into each other’s shoes sometimes.

He pondered this while he filled canteens. He'd resolved to pack everyone a canteen. Of course, he was sure they’d all have one on them. They were SeeDs, so they were prepared for any climate, even for the Egabi, which was a hot, dry, awful place. Cid himself had written the manual on how to survive it, as he’d made the crossing from Esthar to the Orphanage a fair few times in his life and understood exactly what one needed to survive there. So he knew just what they’d be packing with them.

But still. It was the thought that counted. His kids would need something to drink.


	6. Chapter 6

The library was closed when Selphie, Irvine, and Rinoa reached Deling City. It was the early morning of the 18th and the place didn’t open for alumni until the evenings. Besides this, Rinoa needed her access pass. Only she’d left it at her father’s house and she didn’t want to go there to stay, not if she could help it. She’d already spent a fairly stressful weekend there with Squall. And she didn’t want to make a thing out of just dropping by for overnight visits, like she and Caraway were on good terms.

They weren’t. She went home only because every time she visited Deling City she was refused access to the better class of hotel. After Edea’s very public (and, in hindsight to the Galbadians, horrifying) assassination of President Vinzer Deling, Deling City hoteliers tended to announce themselves fully booked when a sorceress dropped by. And the seedy places would take her, but not without leaking it to all the papers. She could sign under a false name in any other city, but in Deling they triple-checked your identity. Paranoia ran high. Paranoia was a part of the Galbadian national character, embedded in the citizens’ collective mind after the war with Adel. Embedded, and growing deeper roots every day.

“How about we swing by my house, but we stay at your place?” she asked Irvine. He’d let it slip once that his dad lived on the outskirts. Or. Well. More specifically, he’d let slip that his dad lived on the outskirts so that he could commute more effectively to his job in the D-District. Irvine’s dad might have been present at the time they’d staged a prison break, but no big deal. Honestly. No big deal, Rinoa. He wasn’t attached to the D-District or to his dad; neither the place nor the personality of the man had been conducive to those little familial rituals like Take Your Son To Work Day. He hadn’t talked to his dad in nearly a year; hadn’t seen him in more than that; didn’t even know anything about what the man was up to, if he lived or died, what he liked to do, or even what he did do on a day-to-day basis.

Rinoa could relate. But, come to think of it, if Irvine had known the latter, it might have come in useful during their rather haphazard prison break.

“You’re suggesting we stay at my dad’s place,” Irvine said. Something about him seemed tired now that he’d discovered the depths of this week’s smear campaign. Rinoa couldn’t blame him. But she wasn’t asking just to avoid Caraway. The outskirts made a certain amount of strategic sense. That was where Squall would have decided to stay: out of sight, where they wouldn’t alert anyone who happened to be illegally using GF magic in the middle of the city.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Selphie said, putting a hand lightly on Irvine’s arm. He seemed surprised at the action, but he smoothed it over quickly, and went back to looking light, easygoing, and unaffected – that Kinneas slacker cocktail of emotions.

“Well,” Rinoa said, “It’s inconspicuous. Out of the way. Right? So what would be your preferred alternative?”

“Rot,” said Selphie.

“It’s not rot!” Rinoa said.

“No,” Irvine said casually. “She’s right. That would be my preferred alternative. To rot. To just rot.”

Rinoa blinked at them.

“I miss when Garden could just book a hotel for you in advance,” Selphie said.

“You got that kind of treatment?” said Irvine. He whistled between his teeth. “Nice for you.”

“Only once,” said Selphie. “It was in the good days. The glory days. We had this silly client out in Timber, some rebel princess who couldn’t strategize for beans and avoided her father at all costs—“

“Hey!” Rinoa said.

Okay, maybe she deserved that a little. Her idea had still been a strategically sound one.

But she was outvoted. Caraway’s mansion it was.

The maid let them in as soon as she saw Rinoa. Or rather, she let them in as far as the atrium off of the main staircase, then muttered something under her breath, then retreated into the kitchen downstairs, performing the bisecting cross of Hyne all the way. Rinoa recited the stupid old rite to ward off sorceresses in her head, almost on reflex, as she saw the woman do this. _Magic half to magic half. Human to stay human._

Rinoa missed the old staff, the ones her mom had hired years ago, who’d been here all through her childhood. Most of them had been Timberi, and they’d disappeared from the household soon after Rinoa had run off the join the Forest Owls. Nothing personal, Caraway had explained to her. He'd just never before considered what kinds of propaganda they might have been feeding his daughter.

Rinoa had wanted to track them down, offer money, get them jobs as Garden staff – do _something_. But most people from her old life saw her as changed. Her old friends. Many of her associates in Timber. Her few sympathetic contacts in the Deling Foreign Office, who’d known her dad for years and felt fairly bad for her. They said no, no; we couldn’t possibly accept your help. You’ve helped us so much, after all. You’re such a helpful girl.

And what they meant was: we don’t want it. Go away. Your help could be dangerous now. You’re a _witch._

Rinoa wouldn't have been able to bear it if Undine, her old nanny, treated her like that. Carefully. Half fearfully. Always looking like she were thinking of the ruin of Trabia Garden, or the Lunar Cry attack on Esthar. As though Rinoa were inexorably linked to all that, which unfortunately Rinoa kind of was, if only by accident. She could have borne it even less from Tiria the undermaid. Or Frantz, the butler. They'd been like family growing up. These new people weren’t family; it didn’t matter so much if they were scared of her.

“Not friendly with the staff?” Selphie said lightly. “We had this Shumi Guardian up at T-Garden who hated us, I swear. He was some kind of NorG spy, I think. Sent up from Balamb. Hated students on principle.”

“Small-minded,” Irvine said, wiping his boots thoughtfully on Caraway’s entry mat.

“That’s what I think!” said Selphie. She was looking down at the entry mat herself, so she clearly noticed that it was there. But she didn’t bother to wipe her boots. Selphie was Rinoa’s primary girl talk confidant; she simply had an aura about her that prompted you to tell her things. So she knew all about the mass dismissal of the old housemaids, Caraway’s role in quashing sixteen Timber rebellions to date, the various deaths he signed off on with nary a care; and how he prized his job above human decency, and order above all, and Rinoa somewhere in the middle, above the rest of humanity, but below things like his good name and his military record.

Selphie was making it known that she would stomp through this guy’s house with muddy boots if she damn well felt like it. Rinoa felt a sudden rush of love for Selphie.

“I wouldn’t’ve let it bother me, Selphie,” Irvine said. “That Shumi Guardian, I mean.” He waved one hand as though dismissing this unknown person, and with the other thoughtfully hung up his cap. But his voice was loud enough to be heard down in the kitchen and probably on the upper landing, too. “People like to scapegoat where they can, right?”

Rinoa felt a sudden rush of love for the both of them.

“Shhh,” she said. “Lay off the heavy-handed analogies or whatever. She’s just a maid. She probably doesn’t _mean_ to be—”

“Nobody _means_ to mistrust and mistreat you,” Selphie said, rolling her eyes.

“I feel bad for them, honestly,” Irvine said, still too loudly. “Ruled by their fear.”

“Right?” said Selphie. “Pathetic.”

“Especially since they’re afraid of _you_ ,” said Irvine. He spread his arms out in a silent supplicant gesture to Hyne, indicating that he, privately, felt that fearing Rinoa was a ridiculous notion. That was comforting of him. Rinoa wished he could be right.

Selphie said, “Yeah. Afraid of you and not your friends. We’re scarier. I mean, Squall? Imagine what he’d do if he found you being treated like this.”

“I’d rather not,” Rinoa said, smiling a little. “I kept it from him last week and he was bad enough then.”

“You shouldn’t’ve bothered. They shouldn’t be scared of your magic,” Irvine said. “They should be scared that you’ve been adopted into the Orphanage Gang.”

“Very bad company,” Selphie put in.

“Desperadoes and ruffians,” said Irvine.

“Lost kids. Lost souls. No homes,” Selphie said. “No cares, no _rules_.”

“I hear one of them’s the Terror of Timber,” Rinoa said.

“That’s nothing,” said Selphie, holding her hands up like she was about to launch into a particularly horrifying campfire ghost story. “They’re the Terror of Timber, Trabia, and Esthar. The Scourge of Dollet. The unlikely rescuers of Deling City from the clutches of that one sorceress that one time. But this doesn't recommend them, since this city? Kinda sucks.”

“They’ll save your world and they don’t even care, the jerks,” Rinoa said, laughing.

“So big-headed,” said Selphie.

“Ready to seduce away your sons and daughters,” put in Irvine with a wink.

“Yes,” came Caraway’s voice from the upper landing. “I can see that.”

_Ugh_.

All merriment died down. This was Caraway’s talent. He sucked the joy out of every room he entered. Rinoa supposed this came in useful for him in his daily routine as a big-name bully.

Oddly, he and Squall had hit it off last weekend. They’d reached a grim and silent accord. Caraway had made it clear that he didn’t hold Rinoa becoming a sorceress against _Squall_ ; that was all the inevitable consequence of his daughter’s own poor life choices. Now she’d irreparably ruined her future. And Squall had made it clear that he didn’t agree on that count, and that furthermore he would be taking charge of any threats against Rinoa’s safety for the next foreseeable eternity, so he thought her chances in life were fairly good, actually.

Caraway had liked that. He respected a little bit of overbearing arrogance in a man.

Squall had proven himself to be the single most heroic and self-sacrificing person on the planet. Rinoa was lucky to have him.

She also sometimes found him a little obnoxious. Rinoa had an unfortunate history of falling for men who were good at making bold proclamations and grand gestures, larger than life men, men on General Caraway’s level. Squall wasn't the worst of the ones she’d picked in this respect; he had a streak of normal teenage surliness that undercut his heroic image, and he was frequently very down to earth, only too happy to bring you down from your grand pedestal. The secret champion of the sarcastic underdog. That said, he was still her Knight. Tied to her for infinity. Would die for her. Completely responsible for her wellbeing.

It was a little like being someone’s child. Rinoa had had a few months to get used to the whole sorceress and knight thing. And she hadn’t. Gotten used to it, that is. She didn’t like the feeling of it. She wanted to be safe – of course she did. But more than that, she wanted to be safe on her own terms. She didn’t want a bodyguard-slash-babysitter looking over her shoulder her whole life. She didn’t particularly want to be a sorceress, when it came to that.

There she and Caraway were in agreement, she supposed.

“Friends?” Caraway said. He didn't sound pleased. He did not, as a rule, approve of SeeDs as friends, nor did he approve of B-Garden. B-Garden was the home of the gutless nouveau riche, a way for poor, worthless kids to get money quickly, provided they had no real loyalty to anywhere and didn’t die taking the SeeD test. Caraway had never liked Timber rebels, Dolletian activists, the countrified bumpkins of Winhill, or the strange cheerful wintry folk of Trabia. But in his mind they were all better than most SeeDs. They at least had roots somewhere, patriotism, honest desire to die for Hyne and country. Whereas kids who flocked to Balamb inevitably sold their honor to the highest bidder. Cid Kramer had long demonstrated a blatant disregard for any kind of moral code, and his lot had been known to fight on both sides of a conflict as long as they were paid to do it and got to skulk back in the end to their little island, which stank of fish and the working class, to hole up far from where Deling City could reach them. SeeDs were almost worse than Estharians, almost worse than pacifists. Of all the peoples of the earth, in Caraway’s ideal universe, the SeeDs would be first against the wall. Caraway could make peace with one or two, particularly if that one or two happened to be tethered to his daughter by honor and magic, duty-bound to protect her. But in general to mention the name SeeD in his house was to point out a bite bug or geezard, a creature of degraded status and ill repute.

This was the image of SeeD that Rinoa had grown up with.

“You know Selphie and Irvine, right?” said Rinoa. “They left their respective gardens for Balamb, remember? They chose the SeeD life. Isn’t that nice?”

Selphie and Irvine seemed confused, because they didn’t know Caraway like she knew him. But they could probably piece together that this was a dig. She couldn’t resist needling him. Just a little.

“Grand,” Caraway said, the way people pronounced a sentence of execution. “You’re more social than normal lately.”

“Not really,” Rinoa said. “I’ve always had friends.”

Had. Her reception with class A last week had been chilly, at best. Oh, Rinoa, you’re _alive_. What a relief. When we heard you’d dropped out and run off to Timber of all places; we were all sure you’d died. You’re so _dramatic_ , Rinoa. You must _love_ being all over the papers. What’s being a sorceress like? Leave it to you to soak up a piece of Hyne; you always did like a little attention. Like that time your chocobo won the gold at the track, yeah?

They, a cabal of nine elite Galbadian heirs and heiresses, the only kids Rinoa had ever been allowed to talk to growing up, hid a barb in every statement. Rinoa had come to see this as typical of Deling City, but it wasn’t, not really. Irvine was from Deling City, but a different kind of Deling entirely; where fathers worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk in service of the regime with no mansions or grand parties as a reward, where no one got to go to prep school, and where the army was one’s certain future. Caraway had always intimated that people like Irvine could be classed somewhere between cannon fodder and babbling infants one had to look after for their own good. But Rinoa was coming to prefer them to her old schoolmates.

Which didn’t mean she’d been unhappy to see her mates. It had been almost a relief, actually. She _expected_ them to look down on her. The SeeDs saw her as a pretty rich girl and not much more, lucky in every way. But to her fellow Galbadians Rinoa had always been weird. It almost didn’t matter that she was a sorceress now. They would have been poking fun at her anyway for something else if she hadn’t been. For always being the one to raise her hand and argue facts that everyone in Vinzer Deling’s realm knew with certainty were Wrong, and besides this Traitorous. For causing her father so much trouble. For using Caraway’s good name to get away with things a lesser girl would have been shot for or imprisoned over. For having a cabaret singer mother. For looking a tiny, tiny bit Timberi.

Yes, everyone on the Galbadian continent was related, but Timber had once been the access point for Esthar, and everyone knew the Timberi had intermarried with the ancestral Enemy. They had the general coloring of the Southern Galbadian continent, to be sure. But there was something about the eyes: dark, dark eyes. And so short. Rinoa was so lucky she was pretty. It would have been awful to be partially Estharian and ugly to boot, but then Timberi were generally attractive in a rough sort of way. No wonder Rinoa was so vain.

Horrible as it was to admit, after months and months of hearing that she was secretly Ultimecia herself, that sort of criticism was almost comforting to Rinoa. It was banal. It took for granted the idea that Rinoa was small and not special and definitely not likely to snap and attempt world takeover, like 95% of all sorceresses did in the end. And, when you got down to it, she'd grown up with these people. She’d been to all the birthday parties (invited only to cater to her father, but still invited), she’d played on the same teams (rarely picked first or second or even eighth, but that was the old gang for you), and learned a fair number of their secrets. She didn’t hate them, not really, not even if she resented some of them and found them all to be stupid, utterly stupid. She just didn’t really like them either. They existed in the same grey area as Caraway, as Seifer Almasy.

They were people she had to harden her heart against, because the truth was: they were very, very hurtful.

“Well, we’ll head to my room now, if you don’t mind,” Rinoa said, brushing all that out of her mind for the time being.

“We have guest rooms,” Caraway said, eyeing Irvine with distaste.

Irvine reached up to tip his hat in agreement, but he wasn’t wearing it because he’d hung it up, so he settled for nodding, and looking tired again. Selphie snorted in disgust.

“Why don’t you just tell your father the truth, Rinoa?” she asked, very suddenly.

Rinoa and Irvine stared at her. For all they knew, Caraway could be in on the whole hidden GF thing. He had no love for Xu and SeeD, and almost certainly would have looked the other way if he discovered someone defying Balamb Garden.

But Irvine seemed to instinctively trust Selphie. He always had a way of deferring to her, going along cautiously but still laying his neck out, riskier than he normally was, just because Selphie happened to be involved. He said, “C’mon now, Sef—“ in what Rinoa had realized, four months into knowing him, was one of his fake tones, his dissembling tones, just a front. “C’mon now. We—we’re just here for…Um.”

He trailed off. Rinoa would have been hard pressed to believe he wasn’t someone attempting to come up with a false story. He just managed to look so _shifty_ as he spoke.

“A GF thing?” he offered. The actual truth. But somehow in the mouth of a working-class Deling boy, it looked like a lie.

“Do you think I’m a fool, boy?” snapped Caraway. 

“Honestly, Kinneas,” Selphie said. She was less convincing than he was, playing her role of aggrieved superior just a little too perfectly, like her training in deceit stemmed mostly from rehearsals for the Trabia Garden Festival Committee’s next theatrical revue. Which it doubtlessly did. But Rinoa thought Caraway was buying it and that was the important thing. And then Selphie saluted him, which was good form. Caraway loved a good grovel.

“It’s nothing to do with you, sir,” Selphie said. “In fact, I think our aims align.”

“Is that so?” Caraway said. _That_ was maybe pushing it too far. Caraway’s alliances with the SeeDs extended as far as agreeing to let them take the fall for murdering a sorceress, which at that time had been to him like setting cockroaches on a rabid sewer rat growing too big to be contained. If they died, so what? They were roaches. And maybe they could get rid of the other, more dangerous pest problem before the life was stamped out of them.

Selphie pressed on. “I’ve clearance to reveal three facts. One, the rampant dissatisfaction at G-Garden, SeeD Kinneas’s old stomping ground, is a cause for concern—“ she managed to make it sound like herein lay the whole reason for bringing SeeD Kinneas, clearly a sorry excuse for a SeeD, along in the first place – “Two, certain allegations made by Martine at an internal Garden investigation. Martine revealed that he and certain G-Garden cadets sought to use the assassination of the sorceress seven months ago as a chance to stage their own coup—“ Oh. Good one. The idea that one of Caraway’s pawns might have schemed against him was something Caraway was open to. He was paranoid, and instinctively mistrusted anyone below him, which was nearly everyone. “And three. The possible existence of a similar plot in the works at this moment, aiming to lure the Sorceress Rinoa to Galbadia in order to accomplish the same aims. Kill her, and take over Deling City as its saviors.”

This was believable. Half of the world wanted the sorceress dead and was sure that accomplishing this could tilt the balance of power in their favor, because people were supposed to hail you when you took out a sorceress, right? At least that was the theory.

“Rinoa is safe,” Caraway said, appalled. “Particularly as long as she's under my roof!” The last point really got to him. He’d always viewed people tangling with Rinoa as people tangling with him. He loved her in his own way; Rinoa knew this. It was just that his form of love involved assuming that Rinoa was simply an extension of his own personal sovereignty, a possession you didn’t mess with unless you wanted to suffer.

“Sir,” Irvine said, looking pitiful and apologetic, and pulling the look off pretty well. “We want that to be the case as much as you do.”

“We aim to prevent any internal Garden strife from spilling over into your home and your daughter’s life,” Selphie said. She’d been sneaking glances at Rinoa the whole time, as if determined to telepathically force her to say the right thing.

Rinoa wasn’t sure what the right thing was. Not right away. But then she thought like a SeeD.

“That’s why I hired them as soon as Squall told me all about it,” she said to Caraway. “To deal with this whole mess before it becomes a real problem.”

“You hired them to bring you back to a city where you know you’re in danger?” said Caraway, openly furious by now. “You’re even sillier than I gave you credit for, Rinoa!”

Oh, for. That was just _stupid_. Every city was a city where she was in danger at this point. She hadn’t been out of danger since her father decided to meddle with assassinating the sorceress Edea and had inadvertently set up a colossal skirmish between the gardens, leading to the battle where Rinoa soaked up her first set of sorceress powers.

Or earlier. Since he gave the order to murder six Timberi rebels and their families and left a copy sitting carelessly on his desk, where his daughter could see it and subsequently decide that maybe it was time to do something about all his shady dealings. If he was going to complain about putting her in danger, he needed to think about maybe not setting up these vast militaristic chess games where he just assumed everyone else’s life was up for grabs. It was tacky. And stupid. And highly hazardous to her health, and for that matter to the health of entirely unrelated innocents who'd never done anything to Fury Caraway except not bend at the knee to his stupid country.

“You know I can’t sit around if someone is trying to kill me,” Rinoa told him. “I don’t just ignore a threat.”

“Well, you must have received something from me,” Caraway snapped. “Dismissed, the three of you. To your room and the West Wing guest rooms while you’re in the house.” Typical. Her room was in the East Wing. He wanted to separate them as much as possible. “If you're still here tonight then I expect to see you at dinner, Rinoa. You other two can eat in your rooms. Accomplish your objectives and then get out.”

Of his house, or of his country? The subtext was unclear. He turned on his heel and left.

Selphie waited until he was out of earshot. Then she said, in a low voice, “You know how some people say Hyne was just sliced in half? Not, like, that his skin came off, but that humans just cut him down the middle? I think your father is the half of Hyne’s pecker that got cut off and thrust at the world. The part with no magic and even less sense of humor! Just a walking, humorless penis.”

She sounded so deadly serious, so unlike her normal bubbly self, that Irvine’s eyebrows shot up, and he bit his lip to keep from laughing. Rinoa herself had to fight down a grin.

“He’s going to be sending someone along to listen in on us,” she warned them. “And to make sure we go where he says. So let me just go collect my pass and then we can get out of here and talk somewhere else.”

She headed upstairs.

“Works for me,” she heard Irvine say. “There was no point in wiping off my boots, was there? Never been in a more unwelcoming place.”

“Yep,” Selphie told him cheerfully, delighting in leaving dirty trails on Caraway’s expensive rugs as she hopped from the first step of the stair to the second. “You’re too soft, Irvine. Too pure. You hide it, but I’m onto you.”

“Yeah?” Irvine said. He sounded pleased.

“Yeah. I’m onto you, dweeb,” Selphie repeated.

-

They scaled the rim of the Egabi, which wasn't easy. They had equipment for rock climbing loaded onto their bikes, since all missions in the Kashkabald left one contemplating the possibility of having to climb the Almaj in order to make a tight escape. But the crater rim was smoother than the nearby mountains. There was less to grab onto. It was slow going all the way down. Their clothes suffered as a result. Quistis kept cursing because hers were new, purple, professional, and neat. Until she had to scale the Egabi, and they became stained, sort of a dusty blue, ripped, and grimy.

Squall took off his tailored military jacket and just tossed it down halfway. He was sweating so much that it was becoming a hindrance. He seemed unconcerned if it turned out some cactuar made off with it before he could retrieve it; he just needed to have it off, period.

Zell, for his part, could feel his hair deflate. He was grateful that he was just wearing his old clothes. No new jackets or sleek outfits for him; he was as unrecognizable now, just as he was, just as normal old _Zell_ , as he’d been seven months ago. That had kind of galled at first. It was because he was from Balamb, and Balamb town was considered dinky and backwards and full of sad little fishermen. Forever a country mouse, that kind of thing. But then he didn’t get picked on by most of the papers, and his clothing was just as reliable and old and unassuming now as it had always been, so he’d learned to see the bright side.

Also, it meant he moved faster than the other two. He didn’t have anything to prove if they were caught out by some roving reporter, so he'd opted for comfort over professionalism. And he wasn’t learning the limits of his own clothing choices; he already knew them. If you could T-board in it, you could probably fight a war in it. The likelihood of injury was much the same.

As if to spite them, Cid was waiting at the bottom. Looking very neat and not at all out of breath, just as un-athletically middle-aged as he’d always been, but completely unruffled, like he hadn’t had to scale the side of the crater at all.

“How’d you get down here?” Zell said.

“I took the stairs,” Cid said placidly.

There were stairs? Cid pointed to his left. Zell picked up Squall’s jacket, shooed away some baby cactuars, and headed off in that direction. He soon found some elaborately carved niches, each set deeper than the last, and all replete with strange images: blocky Ancient Centran vegetation and blockier Ancient Centran figures. They led all the way up to the top of the crater. Well, Hyne be damned. There were _stairs_.

“You couldn’t have told us this?” Zell said, coming back to Cid. He was furious for Squall and Quistis’ sakes. This was, again, Cid all over. Working for Cid was like living inside one of those complicated Estharian holographic games. You had someone outlining some quest, with an object to retrieve or a princess to rescue or something. But they never told you how to do it, so you had to play all these dumb mini games and engage in all these roundabout, unnecessary battles. Until you found whatever you were looking for, and then you gained some advantage, like an airship or a shortcut back to start. Or the knowledge that there were _stairs_. Only by that point you no longer needed that knowledge because you’d done the task already. You should have been given that crucial information before attempting the dumb quest in the first place.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Cid said. “I thought I did.” He reached for his old-fashioned comm phone. “Hmmm,” he said. “Looks like I forgot to hit ‘send.’”

Zell leaned against the crater wall and smacked one hand against his forehead. Hyne. Something was up here. But Zell didn’t know just what.

“Water?” Cid offered. Zell had some on him, but he took some of Cid’s anyway, just to conserve his in case Quistis or Squall needed it later. They had less endurance for these things than he did. Also, he privately considered it a small screw you to Cid to take his help without really needing it.

He surveyed the black dust cloud in the distant center of the crater as he drank. He would have expected it to be bigger from down here. But it seemed to be getting smaller? Somehow?

“It’s winding down,” Zell realized. “Whatever’s going on. The sinkhole forming?”

“What?” Cid said. “Oh, yes. Let’s save explanations until Squall and Quistis get here, though. I don’t want to have to say it twice.”

“You could have just put it in the mission report,” Zell pointed out.

“Well, let’s just say I might not have wanted anything crucial to fall into Estharian hands,” Cid said evasively. “I’ll explain when they’re down here. It’s taking them some time. I shouldn’t mention the stairs, should I?”

Zell stared at him.

“Didn’t think so,” Cid said. He leaned against the wall as well, where there was maximum shade. Not that he looked particularly overheated or rumpled or uncomfortable or anything. They waited together.

“The Ancient Centrans,” Cid told him, for no particular reason that Zell could discern, as they watched the black dust die down, “Were a stocky, powerful people.”

“What?” Zell said.

“They weren’t very tall,” Cid clarified. “They were compact. Powerful chests and large rib cages. Their greatest cities were on the peaks of mountains, and they carved out strange structures to reach down and up and down again. One needed to be small and built strong, rather like you, to survive as an Ancient Centran. Their skeletal remains confirm it.”

Zell stared at him. Cid was an Ancient history buff. Who knew? Zell was a _modern_ history buff. He preferred to read logs of the Galbadian-Estharian war, the rise and fall of the Dolletians, the founding of FH, the eradication of the Estharian tribes. And the popular history of Pupurun as a social tool.

Zell had hidden depths. So, apparently, did Cid.

“Been doin’ some reading in your retirement?” Zell asked.

“Here and there,” Cid said. “Oh, look, Squall.”

Squall landed gracefully at the bottom of the crater. Then he spoiled the effect by gracelessly taking Cid’s canteen from Zell’s hands.

“Yours or Cid’s?” he asked. Zell waved him to Cid.

“Good,” Squall said. “I have my own. But since you brought us down here, Cid, I’m taking yours.” He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It was a careless, tired, attractive gesture. Zell almost forgave Cid for the stairs thing.

Cid seemed unaffected by Squall’s sudden drop in professional manners.

“I brought one for each of you,” he said. “Look, here’s Quistis. Here you go, dear.”

Quistis, apparently less passive aggressive than both of her counterparts, waved him off and drank from her own.

“I’m good, I’m good,” she said. “The dust is going!”

She was right. It was a tiny thing now, just a fog over the ground in the distance. Zell was willing to bet that these were the aftereffects of sinkhole formation. But why did it matter?

“As you guessed, Zell,” Cid said, “This is how the sinkholes form. Here and in the ruins on the North Island, but I wouldn’t bet that there aren’t smaller ones forming elsewhere on the continent, or even in the surrounding oceans. These are simply the only ones I’ve discovered. Each one tends to open at a different time. The ruins sinkhole opens at nighttime; this one appears at approximately oh-seven-hundred each day. We can approach when the dust dies down—“

“Why,” Squall said flatly.

“Well, Squall, the dust does get into my lungs, and I’m not as young as I used to be, ha, ha—“

“Why are we bothering to approach at all?” Squall said. “Make the case for me, Cid. You’re the client here. Your objectives are to figure out why this is happening. I decide the means. Maybe I think the best way to do this is to throw the problem at Esthar. This is their territory.”

“Well, you really need to approach the sinkhole to answer that question,” Cid said easily.

Squall’s normal blank expression became downright mutinous.

“I’ll just go,” Zell said flatly, hoping to stave off any conflict. He didn’t think Squall would stage a rebellion against their old Headmaster, but then you never knew with a guy like Squall. And if he did, Zell would have to go along with it because Squall was his friend and Cid was, well. Not. And someone working someplace like the Dollet Bugle would be sure to find out, and then it would be published, and Ma would be heartbroken, like she’d been over the whole No, No I Was Not Just Leading The Library Girl On And This Is Not A Phase thing; and also people would probably decide Squall was the next Seifer Almasy or something, and that was so unfair that Zell couldn’t even make himself consider it.

Strangely enough, for all their eager defense of Cid the day before, both Squall and Quistis seemed annoyed at Zell for offering to do what Cid wanted.

“We don’t have enough information,” Quistis said.

“Cid hasn’t given us enough,” Squall said.

“What do you think I’m doing right now?” Cid asked, far too cheerful for someone whose formerly-loyal pupils were circling him like sharks.

They couldn’t argue with that. Zell went cautiously over to the center of the crater. Then he stopped, stunned. And just kind of _stared_.

“Sinkhole” was an inaccurate term. Cid must have picked it to capture the fact that these things were apparently opening and closing suddenly all over Centra. But it was better described as a pit. No. Better to use a flowery, old-school instructor word. An _abyss_. The thing formed a perfect gaping circle in the center of the crater, like the black, hollow earth opening wide a hungry mouth.

And, once again, Cid had neglected to mention the stairs. There were stairs leading down into it, circling around and around and around into the depths of the pit until they disappeared from sight. A few had carvings in Ancient Centran script, like the stairs leading into the crater. But these stairs were not made of earth and rock. They were shining, iridescent, beneath a thin film of the black dust. They glittered with all kinds of strange colors: white at first, then shifting to reds and purples and blues, only in shades that Zell had no words for. They looked slippery, but when Zell crouched down and put a careful hand on the uppermost step, a wide and sloping thing, he found that it wasn’t slippery; not really. It was solid and sure. It just happened to gleam. It took him a minute to figure out what that gleam reminded him of, what it called up in his mind.

_No_.

That made no sense. It couldn’t be crystal from the Crystal Pillar. The Crystal Pillar was likely Middle-Age Estharian or something, right? Zell struggled to recall if he’d had any lessons on it. Either way, it wasn’t Ancient Centran. And it was far, far more dangerous than a sinkhole. And it came from the _moon_.

Zell jogged back to where Cid and the others were. He relayed all this breathlessly. Then he added, “Alright, so. Does it summon monsters somehow? Does it call them up? From the earth? What’s down there?”

“You see my concern,” Cid murmured. “Suppose whatever’s down there has the properties of the Crystal Pillar? Esthar won’t use theirs. We think. But suppose it fell into the hands of the Galbadians. Or suppose the Galbadians came to believe that the Estharians had _two_. How would the world react? It takes very little to tip us into outright war; you all know that. There’s a real possibility that we could set the world up for another stunning loss of life. For the third time in two mere generations. No. If there’s power down there, it should go to Garden.”

They stared at him.

“That’s…bold,” Quistis said, after a moment.

“SeeDs are peacekeepers at best,” said Squall. “Guns for hire at worst. Sorceress control all the time. We’re not… Not a power in our own right. We don’t need a Crystal Pillar.”

“I’m not trying to make us a world power,” Cid said gently. “But, assuming that whatever these holes lead to is as bad or worse than the Pillar, it is our responsibility to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Now. I did my best to prepare you all for situations exactly like this, correct? The unexpected. And though I wanted less famous SeeDs – it seemed to me that if we lost any of you heroes, word would get out rather quickly – now I believe Fate has brought you, the world’s saviors, to me, here, on the verge of a great new adventure.”

“You want us to climb down there,” Zell said. “Even though we don’t know what’s there. Because it doesn’t matter to you that it could be nothing, or something really dangerous. Whatever it is, Garden has to get it before anybody else does.”

“Exactly,” Cid said.

Squall shook his head and made an angry cutting motion with his hand. Apparently he wasn’t into the idea.

“Thoughts, Squall?” Cid said. “You’re not just here to follow my orders, you know. As you said, I’m only the client. You’re the Commander.”

For some reason, this made Squall look even angrier. He said, “Let me take a look at the thing.”

Then he strode off, still holding Cid’s canteen. They could make him out easily once he took his gunblade out and started walking around the rim of the pit; by now, the black dust was almost all gone. Zell wondered when the dust would start back up again. Assuming the sinkhole made as much dust leaving as it did appearing. The thing had to vanish at some point, right?

Squall began hacking at something with his blade. They could hear the clanging from here.

“Oh dear,” Cid said. “That looks aggressive. Has Squall seemed more aggressive to either of you lately?”

Loyal Quistis sidestepped the question entirely. She said, “What I’d like to know is what he’s hitting. Those stairs you described? Did they seem very solid and hard to cut to you, Zell?”

“Yeah,” Zell said. “Also sorta gleamy. And priceless. Artifact-y.”

“Oh dear,” said Cid.

At one point Squall stopped, downed Cid’s water, took out his own, and downed that too. Then he resumed his hacking. After about twenty-five minutes he came back, apparently satisfied. He'd lost Cid’s canteen.

“I threw it down,” he clarified. “I didn’t hear it hit the bottom. I also took a sliver from the top stair.” He held it up: a shard of crystal he’d carved off, no mean feat even if it had been a little shocking to see him attack the ground. “We’ll send it to an operative in Esthar. They’ll test it against the material of the pillar without alerting the Estharians. If it’s a match, then we’ll do this. Otherwise, no.”

He looked annoyed to have had to come to a decision at all. After a moment, he added, “We should also probably get someone who can read Ancient Centran on the line. Those markings mean something.”

-

There was exactly one person left in all the Gardens who could read Ancient Centran. There had once been five, but the Gardens had lost them in sundry tragic ways during the Ultimecia war, so now there was just this guy, who wasn't the biggest pain in the ass out of their former collection of Ancient Centran history nerds, not by a long shot; but that didn’t mean Xu particularly liked him.

His name was Nida. He’d spent the past seven months training people to fly Ancient Centran technology with techniques improvised by the more modern Estharians. He was polite and inoffensive most of the time, but if you caught him on a bad day he could bitch endlessly about his job, because the Estharian manner of doing things wasn’t authentically Centran enough for his tastes.

Xu usually looked at him blankly and said, “Yes, Nida. Estharian is not Centran. There is nothing that is Centran. Centrans haven’t existed for years.”

Still, to his credit, Nida worked hard and could follow orders. He was one of those useful souls that slipped through Garden largely unnoticed, only to appear when his particular expertise was necessary. And then vanish again when it was not. Then everyone else would cease to be interested in him, and only his technology students would be entirely aware that he was alive.

In a better world, he might have been made Commander. He was sharp. He collected information. Knew how to analyze and make sense of it. It was either that or go crawling back to wherever he came from: Timber or Dollet or Balamb or even Deling City, if he was one of those few rebellious souls that said screw it to totalitarianism and hitched a ride to B-garden (which Xu suspected he wasn’t; Nida, for all his cleverness, didn’t exactly scream ‘rebel.’). So Nida, like everyone else at Garden, had never had a choice when it came to raw knowledge.

But he was also intelligent in that irritating, competent, slightly off way that this whole new crop of young, weird SeeDs were. Squall. Selphie Tilmitt. Irvine Kinneas. Zell Dincht. Somehow these people pulled it together and didn’t fail you in the final hour. Somehow. Hyne only knew how.

Xu was old guard, compared to them. Not by much, but still old guard. Cautious. Careful. Assessing. She hadn’t made a spectacular wartime debut. SeeD had just been a way for her to get out of Dollet, and then she’d discovered that she liked it here. She liked batty Cid Kramer. She wanted to see Garden thrive. The world – very recently torn between the Galbadian continent in this corner and the Estharian continent in that corner – needed Garden. Cid took missions from anybody, sometimes even from people who couldn’t pay, throwing himself on NorG in a crunch, which had been stupid of him, but that was Cid for you. When people could pay, too, he sometimes turned them down. Sides didn't concern him. He’d thought B-Garden needed a kind of independent spirit; it had to separate itself from great powers; it had to be neutral, and, until the day the sorceress came, it ought to get by looking always to maintain a balance. Never siding _permanently_ with anyone too powerful. Rarely did he take the same client twice unless the payment was very very good; without monetary reward, he seemed to think this was unpardonable favoritism. But when he did it, it was because someone else somewhere (usually Deling City) was employing former SeeDs or G-Garden cadets or something. 

Somehow, even with running the school and paying out their salaries, which to his credit Cid never shirked from, he’d made a slim, slim profit. And he’d also, inexplicably, fucked the world order. The defenseless backwaters of the universe, places like Dollet and Timber, needed Garden. Or else they would have been steamrolled, assimilated, eaten by Galbadia, gone the way of the Ancient Centrans. B-Garden was essential to their survival.

And now B-Garden needed their only SeeD who knew Ancient Centran. He’d taught it to himself. Probably after teaching himself some of those useless made up languages out of high-flown fantasy novels with elves and gnomes and lions and things; he seemed like the type.

“Steps to an unknown underground cavern,” he repeated, as Xu explained the situation to him. He sounded thrilled. Actually thrilled. The very thought of being swallowed up by the earth made Xu claustrophobic, but Nida sounded delighted. “Possibly the origin of the myths of the Underworld Rippers, or the Duchy of Lost Children! Or else a genuine _igless dollia ritua_.” Whatever in Hyne’s name that was. Xu didn’t do Ancient Centrans. She did trashy lit, a secret pleasure, and also pop-science books, because they were light reading with a bearable intellectual edge.

Nida continued, “Or a _ssemetria_. Can they photograph some of the carvings and send them to me? Or are you—“ here his voice rose a few notches, like even contemplating the possibility was just too wonderful to bear, “Sending me out there?”

Hope colored his eyes. He sat taut and straight and nervous, the anti-Irvine Kinneas, vibrating at the notion of being ordered out to the buttcrack of the world so that he could help them decide whether or not to trick Esthar out of some weapon. That might or might not exist. On Esthar’s rightful land. Squall had sounded like he didn’t like that thought of all this when he’d explained it to Xu during their vid meeting. Possibly because he had high-profile relations in Esthar, and maybe also some weird honor code thing about taking missions there.

Squall was adorable sometimes. And by ‘adorable’, Xu meant ‘what the hell, Squall.’ How on earth did he think Garden had gotten their hands on most of their GFs? Did he assume every single one came from nearby Balamb? Because actually they’d always had a Take First, Alert the Appropriate Authorities Never approach. Xu had only made SeeD three years before him, and this had been one of the first things she’d bothered to learn about Garden’s mysterious inner workings. Where it all came from. The GFs, the money, all of it. And the answer was shady places, shady Shumi, and more shady places. Cid and Edea Kramer had literally made something out of nothing with Garden. Magicians, both. How? By creeping into unnoticed places, gathering up the unnoticed kids, finding the unknown sources of magic and power…

But they used all that power well. Or better than Deling City and Esthar would have. It was best for all these bright minds and all this power to go to Garden. Otherwise what was it there for? To be sacrificed to the war machines of two oft-despicable empires?

“No, I’m not sending you out there,” Xu said offhandedly, sorting through the papers on her desk until she found the photos Squall had sent over. Nida deflated, absolutely crushed. She only vaguely noticed. It hadn’t even occurred to her to send him until he’d mentioned it; she suspected Squall wouldn’t appreciate it, for one thing. There were exactly four other SeeDs Squall worked well with; everyone else was a little unnerved by him, because he talked not to them, but sort of around them, in a grim and resolute way. Their nervousness tended to annoy him. In response, over the past few months he’d brought no less than eight older SeeDs close to tears, probably accidentally, without even really trying, simply by force of sheer non-personality. That was just Squall’s special touch with the Command position.

Nida might have been weird, but he didn’t deserve that.

Also, he hadn’t been trained for it. He had standard combat training like everyone at Garden and he’d passed his SeeD test. But his chosen curriculum had focused on tactical support, not field missions. And Xu didn’t like to send many untried, inexperienced people out. It was too risky. It introduced too may unknown variables, wild cards. She didn’t like wild cards. She had enough of them to deal with without adding Nida to the mix.

Xu finally found the photos. She shoved them at Nida.

“Translate, then report to Squall. I want you on it around the clock. This is time-sensitive. You can send everything you find over to him as you find it. No waiting. Waiting gives Esthar time to discover us on their territory.”

The alternative, from what Squall could tell her, would have been to head to the Centra ruins and work there first. They had to tackle that sinkhole at some point; it could very well house anything that the first did. But that was on disputed territory and they could at least make a legal claim to it, so Xu would have to test the waters with the various powers to see what the reception to such a claim would be. Plus there they would have to work nighttime because of the nature of the sinkhole at that particular site, and that was bound to be more dangerous. Better to try and get a handle on what they were dealing with in the Kashkabald first.

“Oh, this is _high_ Centran,” said Nida, breathless with glee.

He stood and saluted and rushed out of the office, clutching the photos to his chest like they were precious. Which, she supposed, they were. To him.

As long as his work was good and he didn’t jeopardize anyone’s safety, she would tolerate him. She wasn’t unfair. The Trepies aside (and, honestly, if you joined Garden to get a look at Quistis’ tits and not to do your Hyne-damned job, Xu had zero pity for you), Xu rarely let her personal dislike color her assessment of SeeDs and cadets. She didn’t _like_ a whole lot of people, sure. But there had really only been a handful of people at Garden that she’d hated; and she liked to imagine that even then she could have been magnanimous, given the right circumstances, such as their profusely apologizing to her, and also begging and humiliating themselves and also surrendering all claim to their undeserved positions on the Disciplinary Committee.

She was flexible. She was no Squall Leonhart. She could bend and work with others. And people might make the mistake of thinking she worked _for_ Squall, on his behalf, but she didn’t. She worked for Garden. And she worked with whoever she had to work with.

Even if they occasionally brought unwanted attention to the place. Which some of them did. Had, for the past few months.

After Nida had gone, Xu surveyed the week’s news. This was a thing she did sometimes. Usually when Garden’s crop of Ultimecia-defying heroes weren’t around. Like right now.

They were all good SeeDs. She reminded herself of this. Again. Over and over again. They were all good SeeDs, even if Squall was unstable and also apparently **Addicted to Performance-Enhancing Substances?** Yes. Hyne. Of course. The substances were called GFs. Next.

Rinoa (she collected Rinoa’s because she had to keep abreast of sorceress info, not because Rinoa was in any way a SeeD) was still the greatest danger known to man. Xu was aware. She had a good few people working on how to detain and kill Rinoa should Rinoa ever go crazy and make a move against Garden. But she didn’t think this outcome was likely, because Rinoa was already pretty crazy, and mostly it came out in stupid campaigns like Save The Ruby Dragons. Next.

Selphie Tilmitt was still apparently grieving, so wasted away by the attack on Trabia that she couldn’t get out of bed. Xu had to wonder if these people had ever met Selphie Tilmitt. Next.

Quistis’s parents. They’d gone from ignoring and belittling their daughter to becoming hyper-Trepies. They were awful, awful people. The actual Trepies kept inviting them into Garden; this was why the actual Trepies had to go. People like that, complete leeches, grandstanding jerks who sucked the life out of someone they were supposed to love -- those people hit Xu the wrong way. Cid used to tell her that she was allowed to make one dumb judgment call a month if she did her job well the rest of the time. This was hers. Screw the Trepies, and also the Trepes. Next.

Irvine Kinneas was sleeping with people again. Hyne the Profane, couldn’t these people find anything new to write about? She knew more about Kinneas’ sex life than was necessary, far far more than she’d ever _wanted_ to know. Now she knew that—

Huh. Xu flipped to the five page spread in the middle of the magazine.

“Hyne the Divine,” she actually said out loud. Then she opened up her Garden mail and dashed off a note to Kadowaki.

**Re: SeeD Kinneas**  
Kinneas will need a psychological evaluation as soon as he comes in, counseling for at least three months. Ref. to legal for contacts if he expresses interest in a suit and would be better for his mental health, but it will not be backed by Garden, would be individual matter, make that clear. Pass him on the eval at all counts, administer blind, send actual results to me.  
Xu

She put the magazine on her desk. She hadn’t realized she’d dropped it in her lap. She had. And she almost didn’t want to touch it. She wanted to throw it away. She didn’t. She put it in the file she was devoting expressly to monitoring these things.

Something in the back of her mind reminded her to dash off a second email, this time about psych evals for the Trepies. She did this mechanically, almost without thinking about it. She was thinking about bigger things. Garden.

Garden did not have a sterling reputation everywhere. Plenty of ordinary households across the Galbadia continent and even in their own Balamb backyard disliked them. They were considered a disruptive, disloyal, warmongering bunch. And Garden didn’t just upend the status quo on an international scale. It also funneled money into the pockets of people who didn’t have any before. Gave skills and a start in life to kids who otherwise would have died at 17, as part of the Galbadian war machine or else executed for being young and angry and defiant in Timber or Dollet. This budding, unpatriotic Garden nouveau riche (though really it was more like a comfortable Garden middle class; not many people hit the really high SeeD ranks and got the big gil) didn’t sit well with some people.

And yet the place also had its staunch supporters. Some people adored it for exactly the same reasons others hated it. Children across the continents dreamed of coming here and making SeeD, making something of themselves. Because of those children, Garden had gained prestige over the years. Not as much as it deserved. But enough to get by. And, even if in some corners it was still plebeian, unromantic, honorless, and tacky; lately it had taken a sharp rise in status, what with their defeat of Ultimecia.

And now it was taking a nosedive again. Xu could almost kick herself for not foreseeing it. A bunch of weird, awkward, mostly-unhappy orphans who didn’t know how _not_ to be taken advantage of to some extent – how were they supposed to live up to the heroic ideals of every nation in the world? Or for that matter any nation in the world? They couldn’t. They just couldn’t.

Garden kids were soldiers and fighters, yes. But many of them were not cut out to be worshipped. Any hero worship that rolled in for them would come up against their rampant memory loss, a great deal of parental abandonment, no shortage of insecurity…

At some point, the worship would turn to revulsion. You’d get stuff like this. Xu was no great friend to Irvine Kinneas, but she felt for him. The world had him in its sights, and it wanted to shoot, because people living in staid Dollet, in ravaged Timber, in oppressive Deling City, in destroyed Trabia – they liked a good character assassination. It distracted them from how small and terrible their own lives might get.

Xu decided to call in on the Deling City mission. She usually let her field SeeDs be for a good twenty-four hours before checking in; Cid had almost never checked in, and Garden had been none the worse for it most of the time, so it wasn’t like there was any reason for her to do it beyond the fact that she was a slight control freak. Only now there was a reason. In addition to wanting a status update on the mission, Xu wanted to know if Irvine had seen this. And perhaps had a mental breakdown.

She buzzed Selphie, who was senior to Irvine by about two weeks and also one rank above him, which put her in command in every respect even though Xu hadn’t assigned command, because their group tended to just ignore her and sort it out between themselves whenever Squall wasn’t there to boss them around. Selphie answered right away.

“Oh, Xu,” Selphie said. “You are not going to like this.”

Then Selphie explained. And no, Xu did not like it.

Small miracles, though? It didn’t sound like Irvine Kinneas was in the middle of a mental breakdown. Small miracles.


	7. Chapter 7

What had happened first: they’d gone to a small and overcrowded café, a bustling place with mirrored walls and golden hangings and waiters in stiff collars. Rinoa had wrapped a bright scarf around her head and obtained some sunglasses, which for some reason were the It fashion accessory in Deling City. Probably because they were expensive here, since they were manufactured mostly in sunny places like Winhill and imported in, but also because they were completely unnecessary given the constant Deling City nighttime. It was still morning here, and it was still night. Sunglasses? Useless here.

Deling City being what it was, a girl like Rinoa could be expected to own at least fifteen totally superfluous pairs of sunglasses. She had given Selphie a neon green pair and Irvine some sleek wraparounds. They looked the ultimate in Deling hipster chic.

Rinoa took incognito very seriously, since she was by the now the most easily recognizable face on the planet. But she was very fair-minded about it. Irvine and Selphie had told her they wouldn’t mind if she wanted to use her powers, go invisible. But to her this remained unthinkable. If even one of her friends was risking potential discovery by the press, or by a SeeD-hating contingent of the Galbadian army? Then Rinoa, too, would undergo the risks. It was only fair.

So instead of invisibility, Rinoa had invoked her Middle Trabian spell. They wanted to talk without being overheard, but she didn’t know a spell to make them inaudible to all but each other. So Selphie had suggested trying to recreate the strange fluke that had infected them all two months ago and left them perfectly able to speak and understand an unknown dead language. It worked.

Selphie loved this spell. She loved the strange, wonderful sense of suddenly thinking differently. Boom! There went your brain. And now you had a new one. You suddenly had highly specific words for some very odd concepts: the sensation of leaving your body behind and becoming one with Hyne’s magic, for example. The nostalgia one had for the eternal connectivity of all beings that had existed when the world was young. The ability to exist without contemplating past or future.

It was obviously not Middle Trabian. They just pretended it was, so that Rinoa wouldn’t get upset. But the language was somewhat heavy on the _k_ s. It put one in mind of Ultimecia.

It was sorceress-speech.

Oddly, Selphie’s GFs loved it. Ifrit and Doomtrain perked right up as soon as Rinoa performed the spell. And Irvine went quiet, a little stunned, like Siren was doing the same. Probably Rinoa’s Alexander and Leviathan liked it also. But Rinoa said nothing to indicate this. Instead she got right down to listing everyone she knew who’d been in the library at the time she’d sensed magic use. It read like a who’s who of Deling City’s elite. These were people whose very names seemed more genteel, more beautiful, fell more sweetly on the ear than just about everybody else’s. Alkonet, Baymoss, Spaiss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta, Betel, Calaminth.

There were first names in there, too, but the surnames were more interesting, because they corresponded to Deling’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of State, the Treasurer-Appointee, and so on. Where they didn’t, Rinoa would often put in that such and such was related to some bigshot on the patrilineal. Spaiss’s father was Secretary of the Interior. Ruta’s, the head of the Cultural Affairs Cabinet. Selinum and Calaminth’s, actual genuine honest-to-Hyne Delings, so it was safe to say that whatever their official jobs were, they commanded far more power than anyone else would have in the same positions.

“Alright,” Selphie said, once they had the list in front of them. “Put down the library staff as well.”

“Oh! I didn’t even think of them,” Rinoa said. She put those names down too. In faux Middle Trabian, so that to everyone but them the writing looked like strange blocky doodles, not actual writing at all.

“We should get them out of the way first,” Selphie told her. “They could tell us if anyone else was there that day. And it would be better if it were the staff, right? If it’s one of your classmates, then we have a problem. Because if they’re violating the agreement then either we have to break it to some Deling bigshot that their kid is ignoring international law, or else the Deling bigshot already knows and is in on it.”

That latter option wasn’t impossible. Just messy and horrible and a political nightmare. A situation tailor-made for SeeD, really. But they wouldn’t jump straight to that. They’d eliminate the easier suspects first. Go slow about it. Methodical. Not Selphie’s preferred method of operating. She liked explosions and danger. But Xu had told them to keep this low-profile.

“We’ll sneak into the library!” Rinoa said. “Lock up the staff and hijack the computers. Get the staff names that way – they won’t give them up if they recognize us – and see the access pass data list. You guys can do that. You have the training, right?”

Wow. Assaulting librarians? Not low-profile.

“We do have the training,” Selphie said. Then, a little sadly, “We also have the training to just ask.”

“And I know enough about Gryphon that I think we’ll be able to get the information we need right away,” Irvine added, somewhat mysteriously.

Rinoa blinked at them both.

It seemed to Selphie that sometimes Rinoa forgot that, just because SeeD _could_ theoretically topple whole governments and carry out assassinations and hack into every data system save Esthar’s, that didn’t mean SeeD always _would_. Stuff like that was often more trouble than it was worth. If they got really flashy about it, started going around advertising everything they could do, then they'd become even more provoking and threatening to the world order than they already were. And then who knew what they’d have to defend against? Galbadia would attack Garden straight out if they thought SeeD posed as much of a threat as SeeD really did. Deling City strategists were not known for holding back militarily, even if at present they were hobbled by recent world events.

The only reason they’d held back so far, as far as Selphie could tell, was because for some people Garden had nothing to do with defeating Ultimecia. The papers still treated Garden like a fancy charity school and less like a military powerhouse. Credit for any recent derring-do went not to the organization as a whole, but simply to the new orphanage gang in slightly uneven shares. 50% or more to Squall. 40% spread out irregularly among his support team: Irvine, Selphie, Zell, and Quistis. And then about 10% to the new sorceress, who was expected to have gained her powers by toppling the old sorceress anyway, because sorceresses, everyone knew, didn't play nice and were inherently threatening and would always be a problem.

But as long as it looked like SeeD was containing Rinoa (which, it had finally come out, was the whole point of SeeD in any case: to take the problem of the sorceress out of nice people’s hands), then the public would tolerate Garden.

And just as she’d given Caraway exactly that impression, so too did Selphie give it to the librarian at the Gryphon Library.

“We would appreciate your help,” she said, leaning over the front desk so far that she was basically balancing on her hands, her feet dangling back over the edge. The librarian blinked. “We believe a threat against Rinoa may be coming in from G-Garden, and that somebody may have trailed her here a week ago. Could you possibly check the access past list for us? Just to make sure there’s nothing suspicious.”

Rinoa’s librarian was the opposite of their warm, smiling Library Girl back at Garden. He was an insectile creature; the kind of person you could imagine being crushed by accident between the pages of a book and then trapped there, flattened and skinny, for all eternity, until only a bloody imprint on the pages remained. Tall and spindly, wire-frame glasses, indeterminate age. Rinoa’s magic-sensing power had written him off as their mystery caster; Selphie had questioned him obliquely about different kinds of magic and agreed that this was a sound conclusion. But he was still useful; he could give them a more complete picture of who else had been there that day. He blinked, looked unhappy to find Selphie so close all of a sudden, and said, “I can assure you that the kinds of persons who enroll at G-Garden _never_ set foot on the Gryphon campus—“

“I have. Three floors, two wings,” Irvine said.

“I—I beg your pardon?” said the librarian. He regarded Irvine with the same upper-crusty disdain Caraway had, only there was a slight tinge of fascinated horror as well. 

Possibly he read the gossip rags.

Selphie became annoyed at this and propelled herself forward a little more until she was centimeters from his nose. The librarian grimaced. Her wrists protested, but not by much; she didn’t weigh much and they could support her weight for a little bit more, plus this was for a good cause. Namely, freaking out an asshole who clearly thought he was better than her boyfriend.

She also took a minute to remind herself that while she was here in Deling she should remember to murder Rill Tremlett.

“Two wings of stacks on three floors,” Irvine was saying, “A star-ceiling reading room on the top floor, twenty-four individual study rooms in the back of the building, newspaper archives in the basement, school archives in the attic, private lecture hall with Estharian jade-inset fireplace donated by Vinzer Deling after the war with Adel, six computer rooms, reading garden with statues of famous alums, this really big staircase,” here he extended a hand at the massive spiral staircase just behind the desk, “And a hidden back staircase that connects to a tunnel underneath the basement that then connects to the rest of the campus buildings.”

“She told you that!” said the librarian, pointing a finger at Rinoa.

“No,” Rinoa said, stunned. “I didn’t, actually.”

“We’d get farmed out to do bodyguard duty for these kids sometimes,” Irvine said, shrugging. “We’re younger and better looking than soldiers, we all learn how to drive at age twelve, we'd keep our mouths shut about anything we found out or else Martine would have had our hides for betraying client secrets; and, hey. Sometimes we’d even sit exams or write papers so they didn’t have to.”

The insect face went red. “A Gryphon student would _never_ cheat—“

“No, they really would,” Rinoa said. “What exams did you sit?”

“Introduction to Para-magic,” said Irvine. “Plus a few governance seminars. And I turned in a paper on the theory behind Guardian Forces once; that was fun. I got to raid your resources on GFs. We didn’t have nearly as many at G-Garden. My client just gave me his access pass so I could get in here to do it. And the funny thing is, it had a photo on it. But as long as I looked like I belonged here, this guy here never once checked to make sure the photo was mine.”

“That’s right. It must have been you,” said Rinoa, pointing at the librarian. “You’ve been here since I started going here.”

Sputtering from the librarian. The insect face got so red that Selphie hopped off the desk, because possibly this guy’s head would explode, and while she had a dark intellectual curiosity that made her want to see that happen, she didn’t particularly want to be in the way of the blood splatter.

Irvine nodded. “You were the one whose job it was to make sure I matched the ID being swiped. In fact, I remember you pretty well. I could probably testify to it being you.“

“And I have to wonder,” Selphie finished, “What people like General Caraway and Minister Alkonet and Secretary Spaiss would think, if they found out you were letting just anyone into their kids’ private playground?”

They had him cornered.

“We’re gonna need that access pass list,” Selphie said. “Even though I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna be that helpful. What with you not doing your job and all…”

The librarian scowled. He retreated to his computer and printed the list.

“Thank you!” Selphie said brightly, once she had it in her hand.

They turned to go. Irvine gave a polite tip of his cap to the librarian, which was somewhat undermined by the fact that they’d just shaken the guy down, orphanage-gang style. Rinoa, Selphie reflected, was really getting the hang of being a member of the orphanage gang. She would never be a SeeD – that was raw power and military precision. But being a member of the orphanage gang was just as good, because _that_ was trusting your teammates’ instincts, having their backs at all costs, and bullshitting like a pro if it came down to that.

“Hey,” Selphie whispered, putting a hand on her back. “Nice work.”

Rinoa said, “Thanks, Selph—“

Then she stopped. Just stopped at the foot of the library’s massive spiral staircase, right underneath the glorious glass monstrosity of a chandelier. Her whole demeanor changed. Her face looked worried. Irvine and Selphie stopped too, to see what was wrong with her, and in that instant someone else came in through the wide double doors in front of them and said, “ _Rinoa_!”

It was a girl.

She italicized 'Rinoa' when she said it. Selphie could hear her doing it. It was in her ultra-genteel voice. Not just Rinoa’s regular name, but Rinoa’s name said with patrician significance, almost over-enunciated. Rinoa herself did this sometimes when she talked, but she seemed to have trained herself out of the practice overall. It only came up to emphasize points that Rinoa felt more morally grey, more callous minds might gloss over. This girl did it as a matter of course, like she'd been taught that any word she chanced to utter might be so important that she had to emphasize it.

She was tall, nearly six feet. Athletic, broad-shouldered, but with a slim frame in that way Galbadians liked. Her hair was fair, like that of an old Dolletian princess or an Estharian lady warlord, her eyes an indeterminate pale grey. Her face could only be Galbadian, like Rinoa’s, but she didn’t have the odd delicacy about the mouth, or the uncommon warmth about the eyes. So without her height and coloring she would have been no great beauty. Deling City shop owners and hoteliers had those same features arranged in basically the same way.

“Oh, Missy,” Rinoa said, blinking. “Listen, we’re kind of busy—“

“Rinoa, you’re back! I’m so glad! And who is this? Is the Commander here, too? He seemed like such a nice boy, nothing like what the papers say—“

“No, no,” Rinoa said, “Listen, Missy, I— We—”

Missy looked once to Irvine, once to Selphie, and settled on Selphie. Specifically, she put her hand on Selphie’s arm, with a kind of odd fluidity. Selphie suspected she should find the action overly-familiar, but she couldn’t, because Missy seemed very aware of their height differences, and stooped a little to make up for it, and smiled. And while she seemed wary of Irvine, she still grinned at him and said, “Oh, it’s so nice that you’ve brought along a Galbadian this time. You know I was dying to meet him. And you, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. I think you’re so strong.”

Incognito or not, Missy had apparently identified Irvine right away, and put together who Selphie was. So much for low profile.

With the hand that wasn't holding Selphie’s arm captive, Missy reached into her bag for her access pass. Her thumb covered the first part, but Selphie caught her surname: Spaiss, which made her a Deling heiress on the middling to high level, with not one but two genuine Secretarial parents. She also caught Missy’s middle name, Abcynthia, which indicated that these parents were stunningly cruel people.

She said, “Rinoa, I’m so glad you’ve come by, because I thought I was all alone, and, you know, there’s nobody here today. Everybody in class A is going out tonight and I’m the only one still doing the silly governance paper because I was transferred in after you left, so I’m always behind, and—”

“How do you know they’re not already here?” Rinoa said suddenly, apropos of nothing.

Selphie approved of this question; they had to figure out where some of these people were if they were going to question them later on.

“They’ve all messaged to tell me,” Missy said, dropping her pass in her bag and fishing out a vidphone instead (high end, one of these new ones that took advantage of the increase in planetary radio function, but backwards compared to the perfected Estharian model). She held it up like Rinoa could peer through and read all her messages automatically. Which was something that, Rinoa being a sorceress, Missy probably assumed Rinoa could actually do.

After a minute of Rinoa not doing this, but instead just staring at Missy with a puzzled look, Missy passed her the phone. Then she said, very seriously, “I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

“That’s nice,” Rinoa said. She sounded uncharacteristically short. “Listen, I have to do something. You can call me later.”

This was not good SeeD thinking. If you had to question someone, and they practically opened themselves up to you, then you let it happen. Good SeeDs didn’t spit on the blessings of Hyne and all that. Rinoa was learning how to conduct herself like a SeeD, but she still wasn’t quite there. So Selphie overrode her. Selphie said, “Actually, Missy, we were wonderi—“

“I don’t have your number!” Missy insisted.

“Pretty sure Caraway’s stuck it in the directory,” said Rinoa.

But then, apropos of nothing, Missy said, “You don’t have to be afraid of being a sorceress, Rinoa.”

Rinoa blinked. Selphie blinked. Even Irvine, slouching against a column, straightened up and shot them both a weird look, blinking. This had come out of nowhere. It was strangely direct for someone who had probably grown up surrounded by Deling City double-speak. And it was beautifully perceptive – it cut right at the heart of what Rinoa was dealing with these days. Squall had indicated that he felt Rinoa’s Deling friends were all barbed speech and ugly gossip, not real friends at all, not that he was any kind of expert on the topic. But maybe he’d been wrong.

“I mean,” Missy continued, seeming uncomfortable, “When you were here. Everyone kept bringing up Adel and all that. And that awful other one. Edea—“

“Ultimecia,” Irvine corrected. “Edea’s not a sorceress anymore, actually, and she’s—”

“Responsible for the death of our president,” said Missy, waving one long-fingered hand. “But that’s _obviously_ not you, Rinoa. Those women were irrational, degraded, wild—“

Wow. Unkind words about Matron aside, Missy seemed to be trying for a compliment, maybe? But she seemed to be trying wrong. Reminding Rinoa what sorceresses could turn into was maybe not the best way to go about this.

“I—“ Rinoa began.

“You were raised right here with us in Deling,” said Missy. “And we might have had our differences of opinion, but honestly. You’re a good person. Everybody else knows it, too. They’re just like that, you know. They’re just trying to bring you down. They’ve been very strange since Ruta’s sister took up with these silly G-Garden people, all GF talk and—“

Oh, jackpot. Thank you, Missy. Perfect, wonderful, beautiful, exactly what they'd come for. Selphie let the Matron talk drop (and, anyway, she was somewhat cold on Matron herself; yes, it was Matron, but then there was the ruin of Trabia to consider). Selphie could have hugged Missy.

“What was that, Missy?” she said, waggling her fingers in front of Missy’s face to get her attention.

Missy blinked.

“GF talk,” she repeated. “That Headmaster Martine squirreled one or two GFs away, I think? In secret. And Ruta’s sister met this G-Garden boy who had one with him, and they’re all aflutter with it, because you know none of us uses para-magic. She’s probably meeting with him right now. I don’t think it’s appropriate. Para-magic is so… It’s for soldiers. And backroom brawls. I think they’re all a little fascinated, though. And jealous of poor Rinoa. Some girls would die to be a sorceress. It’s so odd. I mean, it’s one thing to meet up with a Garden type and, and…“

Missy trailed off, as if suddenly aware that she was speaking to two Garden types.

“…go slumming?” Irvine suggested. “It’s fine. Tell us about the GFs.”

“Yes,” Rinoa said, oddly urgent. This was the thing about non-SeeDs. Sometimes they couldn’t keep their cool. “But I think we should maybe go—“

Go? That made no sense. Missy was proving to be a valuable informant. They should stay, more like, and see what else they could get out of her.

“About Ruta’s sister,” Selphie said to Missy, talking over Rinoa. “Was she here last week when Rinoa came by?”

“Oh, she’s always here,” Missy said.

“Like right now!” Rinoa said. “Maybe she’s here right now!”

“No, no,” said Missy. She brought her phone out again. This time she bothered to actually show them the messages. One, from a Tulip Ruta, simply stated: _can’t study today, with my hon @ Yyl Majesdane. ;)_

“That’s probably the G-Garden cadet,” Missy said disgustedly.

“Okay,” Rinoa said. “Fine. We know its Tulip.”

Irvine and Selphie stared at her. This was coming perilously close to giving up the game, suggesting to Missy that they were here for a reason, letting anyone know that they were here to do more than investigate G-Garden.

“The thing is—“ Rinoa said.

“Where’s yyiiil whatever?” Selphie said, speaking over her again. “This place they’re supposed to be at? See, the funny thing is, Missy, we heard that there were some threats against Rinoa coming out of G-Garden.“

“And if we could talk to Tulip’s cadet that might orient us,” Irvine put in. “Sounds like he’s not big on the establishment there.”

“Of course,” Missy said, brightening. “I’d love to help—“

“Guys,” Rinoa said, desperate and not at all subtle. She was distressed enough that she made Missy stop short, stop helping. Instead, Missy put a concerned hand on her arm.

Irvine stared at Rinoa. Selphie stared at Rinoa. Never before had it been alarmingly clear that Rinoa had been raised a slightly clingy Galbadian heiress and not, in fact, a SeeD. She was carelessly throwing them off their lead, just after Missy had so helpfully dropped it in their laps.

Irvine shook his head slightly, warningly. Selphie mouthed: _Rinoa. Not now_.

In response, Rinoa vanished with a hail of feathers.

-

It occurred to Irvine that maybe sometimes sorceress magic could go haywire. And that if and when it did, the sensible thing would be for the sorceress to try and warn her friends.

He could see the exact same thought occurring to Selphie at the exact same time. Specifically, several milliseconds too late. Rinoa had already been replaced by feathers.

_A poor friend you both make!_ Siren snorted.

“Shut up,” Irvine thought at her. “You don’t have friends, period. What d’you know?”

As soon as he thought that, it occurred to him that he hadn’t had friends, period, until he’d met Rinoa and reconnected with the rest of them. And so Siren thought the same thing, and became just a touch more smug, which was really unnecessary: she was smug enough as she was.

Missy cleared her throat. She looked appalled. She was a good looking girl (a bit wary around Irvine, but who wasn’t, with what people were printing about him these days?), if not quite on Selphie’s level, and she’d been kind to Rinoa, so whatever Irvine thought about her school or the kinds of people she probably hung out with, he put it aside.

“It’s—“ he began, as calmly as he could, “It’s alright.”

Was it?

Was Rinoa alright?

So her powers were acting up. She’d gone invisible, probably against her will. That was all. She was still there, right?

_Or something terrible has happened to her_ , put in Siren, echoing his thoughts.

There was a crash behind them. Irvine whirled around. Some unseen force had knocked a pile of books from the librarian’s desk onto the floor. The librarian looked affronted. Missy looked even more startled than she had before. They were so focused on the books that they completely missed seeing one of the white feathers blanketing the floor suddenly drift up and smack Irvine squarely on the nose, three times.

Then, for good measure, it tangled itself in Selphie’s hair.

Rinoa was still with them. Just invisible.

“She’s teleported,” Selphie said suddenly.

Selphie had a tendency to pull complete lies out of thin air to explain difficult situations. It wasn’t anything SeeD had ever taught her to do. It was just who she was. As a child, she’d been much the same, stealing Zell’s toys, putting glue in Quistis’s ponytail, tying Squall’s shoelaces together, appropriating Sis’s dolls, locking Seifer in the beach shed, and then concocting very elaborate fabrications that Matron hadn’t _really_ believed, of course not, except that half the time she _had_. Selphie had a fairly good track record with the bald-faced lie.

Particularly since Irvine always backed her up on it. What could he say? He wanted to see her succeed.

“We’re actually investigating a report that some of the dissatisfaction in G-Garden might be boiling over into outright sorceress hate,” Irvine said, pulling from Selphie’s earlier lie to Caraway.

“We told her that if it turned out there really was magic involved, she should teleport right away!” Selphie said. “Yep! That’s what we said!”

“Good thing she remembered and took us up on it,” said Irvine.

“She’s the best,” said Selphie.

“Follows orders like you can’t believe,” said Irvine.

“What a trooper,” Selphie said. “So sorry that sometimes we forget that.”

“We really don’t give her enough credit,” Irvine said.

There was a brief, sudden _hrrrmph_ from near Irvine’s ear.

“You must take really good care of her,” said Missy. “I’m so glad SeeD exists to control the sorceress power. Imagine poor Rinoa without you.”

Another _hmph_ , this time louder.

“Did you say something?” Missy said to Irvine.

“Just clearing my throat,” Irvine said. “Listen, Missy, about your friend. Tulip Ruta? Like Selphie was saying. Can you tell us where exactly she and this cadet of hers might be? I might even know him, so if we can get him to talk straight—”

“Tell you? I can show you! You’re so good to Rinoa; it’s the least I could do for a friend of a friend!”

Irvine held a hand out towards the door.

“Lead the way,” he said gallantly.

But as they walked away, there was a brief tug at his arm.

“I’m staying,” came Rinoa’s voice, hissed and low.

Irvine whirled around to where he thought she was. _What?_ he mouthed in her general direction. The librarian, either because he’d had to deal with SeeDs or because someone had just become feathers with no warning in the middle of his library, or else because of the scattered books on the floor (it was not this guy’s day), scowled.

“You should really pick those up,” Irvine told him hurriedly, tipping his cap. Then he turned his attention back to trying to communicate with the space where Rinoa was maybe standing.

“I have to do something here,” Rinoa whispered. “Meet me back at Caraway’s. I think the problem is bigger than we think it is!”

Before Irvine could figure out how to communicate with an invisible person without looking completely crazy, there was a brief shifting of the feathers on the floor, as though Rinoa were passing over them as she walked away. Then the ID pass-scanning machine at the base of the stairs rattled, like someone was climbing over it with no care for the damage they might do. Then he thought he heard, faintly, the kinds of footsteps a hundred-pounds-wet girl might make as she ran up the stairs.

Away from her friends.

In the middle of a mission.

“What in Hyne’s patootie…?” Selphie muttered, at his elbow.

She’d put it together, too. Whatever was wrong with Rinoa? Had made her run away from them. Which wasn’t very Rinoa-like. Rinoa did not abandon ship; it wasn’t her nature. Rinoa took loyalty and teamwork seriously.

On the other hand, it wasn’t like anyone could accuse Rinoa of _not_ being overconfident and harebrained.

_Remember that time she kicked you down a flight of stairs_ , Siren put in.

“’Course I do,” Irvine thought. “I just thought of it. That’s why you can think of it.”

_Can I have that?_ Siren said. _Good times. From my perspective. Not yours._

“Are we going?” Missy said, having completely missed Irvine and Selphie’s baffling exchange with the Invisible Girl. “I do have a paper to write, but I’d much rather help Rin out, because—“

Irvine put Siren out of his mind. Er. Hypothetically.

“As loyal as you are beautiful,” he told Missy.

“We can take my car,” Missy said, looking prim and flattered.

Selphie rolled her eyes.

“Fine. Let’s go,” she said. “We can…collect our things at Caraway’s—“

Irvine said, “Our malfunctioning—“

Selphie said, “Slightly puzzling, wayward—“

They finished together, “ _Things_.”

Rinoa.

“After we’ve sorted this out,” Selphie added. “Mission always takes priority.”

“How very military,” Missy said mildly. It was hard to tell if she approved. But then she was giving them a ride, so Irvine figured her hesitancy around SeeD could be forgiven. 

It wasn't standard SeeD procedure to take rides from strange tall heiresses. In the first place, girls like that didn’t come around often. In the second, you never knew if ‘ride’ could be code for ‘trapping you in a confined Galbadian military vehicle and shooting you like a dog.’ But Missy’s car couldn’t have trapped them. It wasn’t built for trapping. It was built for showing off.

It was an F-type Thrustaevis, sleek and shining and silver-blue, all modern lines, designed after the Dec Arto movement that was in vogue in Deling City right now. After the functionality and solid ugliness of Garden transports, it looked like some grandiose drug hallucination on wheels. Irvine was not a car man by any means – he had too many vices to add another, more expensive one to the list – but this thing would have their humble Balamb mechanic back home paying Missy just for the chance to work on it. To touch it, even.

The inside was so clean and spotless that one could have mistaken Missy for a Garden kid, raised into impersonal military precision in all things. There were no small touches, nothing special or unique to reveal Missy’s character or interests. There weren’t even the obligatory fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror.

“It’s new,” Missy said. “I only just received my permits.”

After Ultimecia’s takeover, to drive in Deling City on a full-time basis you had to pass fifteen tests, including a full background check and a blood test and a test of patriotism. These cost, on average, sixteen hundred gil paid out to the state. The car needed to be registered and insured by the Deling Insurance Co., equipped with trackers to be activated in case of suspicious activity, and it was, per the law, partially owned by the government, who could seize it at any time, for any reason. Officials and heiresses made up the bulk of the city’s drivers. The Car Rental had shut down. The bus now checked ID.

Deling was now a city of pedestrians, for the most part.

Selphie, who’d snagged the front seat, was saying, “Now, give us the layout of yyill…“

“Majesdane,” Missy said, “Of course.”

She outlined what she knew about the place. Irvine committed it to memory, interjecting where he thought he could add some useful fact about the G-Hotel district, and mentally shooed Siren away from the information he was taking in. When Missy had told them all she could, she and Selphie lapsed into a friendly discussion about fashions in Trabia versus fashions in Deling. Irvine would have been an able participant, but for the fact that Selphie had sent him a baleful look over his earlier flirtations, so he mostly kept quiet and stared out of the window for the duration of the ride.

His Garden papers listed Deling City as his hometown. It wasn’t, not really. He’d been shuffled from the orphanage to Deling to G-Garden in the span of six years, and yes, most of that time had been spent in what was, on paper, Deling City. But it wasn’t Deling City. Not really. It was the Southeast outskirts. That was very different. Blocky, military construction. Miles of garbage dumps and factories and timber-cutting yards, a nameless industrial zone crossed with rail tracks and highways, army vehicles clanking by every hour on the hour, taking parents to the missile site or a training ground, down into the desert for their job at the prison, across to the coasts to serve patrol in the unlikely event that Esthar woke up again someday and attacked from the West.

North of Deling was less polluted, more beautiful, but so overgrown with monsters as to be uninhabitable. In the days of Holy Dolletian supremacy, it had been peopled by the Acenath, an empire that far predated even Dollet’s, that had once waged war with the Centrans. The Acenath had possessed a glorious flourishing nation that reached down into where the Galbadian desert was today. Accordingly, they had some descendants among modern Galbadians, darker-skinned than the rest, with beautiful names like Mosshill or Skyfin, Seagill or Wingflower. But they had angered a sorceress coming out of Dollet, the all-powerful Domitia, whose knight had been one of the most bloodthirsty high dukes of the Dolletian empire. In short time, they’d fallen. Their cities had disappeared overnight, barren and empty of people. And it was said that their central lands were cursed, now and forevermore. Their last ancient king’s name had been struck from the history books; his tomb laid to ruin. And the surviving Acenath became Dolletian.

So too had, over time, the Safra of the desert, the Nah warlords of the midlands, the Kalevan of the Northern peninsula, the Brais who’d once dotted the land near Winhill, and the old Timberi foresters and frontiersmen. Until it made no sense to call the empire Dolletian. Domitia and her knight had consumed the continent. Their realm, though it would eventually break back into scattered city-states, could only be called Galbadian.

And the vast industrial suburban stretches between Deling and the rest of the continent were, to Irvine’s mind, the most Galbadian of Galbadian places. Useful. Functional. Ugly. It was where the great machine of the Galbadian army lay, spaced out and separate from ordinary citizens, but always just a day’s ride away. Where Vinzer Deling’s secrets and worst abuses were buried, alongside valleys of soot-blackened trees and red deserts stained by cheap car oil and para-magic effluence. Irvine had grown up there, but you didn’t really grow at all there. Nothing grew. Moving forward in any way was a choking process, gasping for air among the smog and the banging, intrusive activities of the army. Ignoring the results of military orders and basic facts and all facets of smothering reality. The people living there – some seventy-five percent of Vinzer Deling’s subjects – usually went to work for the army, scraping by a kind of existence. And then, to _live_ , they pretended they weren’t Galbadian at all. They reached out, desperate, for some clear spot of fresh air and freedom in any small way they could: old books, pretty faces, fantasies of old Dolletian cowboys living free among the Safra in the desert, religious ecstasy, sex.

Galbadia was not a happy place. Irvine had willingly traded away a million memories of it. And held on, anxiously, to the clean orphanage, to the wide and endless Centran beaches he’d played on, to the little girl who’d pushed him into tide pools only to rescue him from the sea crabs minutes later.

Unlike people unlucky enough to be born in Galbadia, Irvine had roots elsewhere. Far away, in a place Deling City couldn’t touch. In this way, he could understand Rinoa’s love for Timber. Timber might be humble, might be poor. It didn’t have the glamour Deling City did, nor did Edea’s orphanage. But these places didn't have the banal ugliness, either, and neither were they so stifling.

“Though to be fair,” Irvine thought, as they crossed the bridge out of the mansion district, “You’d never know how horrible it can be to be Galbadian if you go by Deling City.”

_It’s actually pretty here_ , said Siren.

“And fake,” Irvine thought.

Deling City was the front, the cover, a star on a grat shit pile, blinding you with its brightness so that you couldn’t see what lay underneath. It was an architectural and artistic marvel: a mélange of all the different kingdoms Vinzer Deling’s distant ancestor and his sorceress had conquered. Old Dolletian castles, mansions paneled in glossy imported Timberi mahogany, beautiful apartment complexes with courtyards and fountains in the style of the old desert palaces, high iron gates with the impressive pyramid-symbols of the Acenath, parks studded with shining cobbles mined near Winhill. Not to mention neon from the outskirts, antique green glass blown by Nah descendants out in Dollet, and beautiful squares and townhouses designed by Timber’s infamous and famously artistic betrayer, Baron Shasnamun.

It was a jewel of a town. Even the smog of the outskirts seemed to collect around it in such a way as to offer the city not a cover of hideous, polluted clouds, but a kind of sublime eternal night. Cyrel Leyephs, poetical nephew to Ursula Deling II, had claimed it wasn't smog at all, once you reached Deling City. Instead the nighttime here was a living thing, a breathing monster, a Guardian Force whose eternal task was to protect the sacred heart of the new Galbadian empire. A pretty thought. A nice image to drop, on a dark Deling evening, when you were walking some cute girl upstairs to her room at the G-hotel and wanted to impress her.

But it was smog. Just like the reality of Galbadia was miles and miles of misery between here, Timber, and Dollet. So too was the reality of the poetical nighttime simply, unmistakably, smog.

“It’s so glamorous here,” Selphie was saying as they passed the presidential palace. “In Trabia we don’t have castles, or—“

“The interior was modeled on the _original_ Dolletian imperial palace,” noted Missy.

“I don’t remember seeing anything like that in Dollet,” Selphie said.

Irvine cut in. “’Cause of Catkin’s Men, Selphie.”

Selphie turned around, stared, raised an eyebrow at him.

“Catkin’s men?” she said.

“You mean you don’t know?” said Missy, aghast. “Don’t they teach you any Galbadian history in Trabia?”

_No_ , Siren supplied, drawing on what she’d learned from Irvine. _Probably not. Because it’s mostly propaganda_.

“No,” Selphie said bluntly. “Of course not. Why would we care? We’re not Galbadia.”

Missy sniffed. But then, evidently, she decided Selphie ought to learn the story anyway. It was an important story.

Or at least that was the party line.

-

Zsinma Catkin, if you went by the Galbanization of her original name, had been Dolletian on her papers, daughter of a Nah glassblower in reality, and descendent of warlords in her mind. In her head, it was said, she’d imagined herself the heir to some grand ancient kingdom. She’d been an upstart like that. Rebellious. Born arrogant.

At age fifteen, she'd left home and trekked across her people’s ravaged ancestral lands (not yet industrialized, but overrun with Galbadian army deserters, no place for anyone to live unmolested) to Deling City. There, she’d taken up the newspaper life. She was no great fan of the government. In those days, this was not a killable offense, merely a jailable one. She served time regularly, a week every month in the Deling City PD’s cells, until she was twenty-one. She used the time to write angrier, ever-more-critical articles.

It was the era of Ursula Deling IV. Ursula was a weak Deling. The blood of dukes and sorceresses had gone very thin in her. She was harmless and sweet, but very mad. She lived sequestered in the presidential palace with aides and doctors, issuing raving proclamations that rarely impacted or affected the populace. She feared that the eternal nighttime was not smog, but a sign of Hyne, a curse on the city. Therefore she spent hours locked indoors, surrounded by sun lamps, addicted to brightness. Her government rarely legislated at all; the city was lawless—

_Not the worst it would become_ , put in Siren, silently giving voice to a stray thought that had crept up into Irvine’s mind as he listened.

\--and her brilliant daughter, Vincenza III, was still a child, unable to control the family’s unruly subjects.

Catkin delighted in the chaos in Deling City in this time. She became a byword for dissatisfaction, sowing discord among the gangsters and thugs proliferating on every corner, and criticizing the palace at every turn. She had the ear of the common man, and she used it to advocate for the end to their continent-wide alliance. Dollet, Timber, Winhill, the desert, the midlands – all pledged loyalty to Deling City. And why? For what? Deling City, Catkin argued, couldn't control _itself_. So it was time to throw off its yoke. There was no use anymore for Galbadia. Better to go back to being their own nations, once and for all.

Now, Catkin’s childish anger, her fantastic desire to disrupt the order of the Galbadian Alliance, had some very real supporters. Immigrants to the city of Deling, two-faced hypocrites from Timber and Winhill who could only survive on Deling City’s dime, flocked to her. And the unthinking local man, annoyed at his tax dollars being spent for the benefit of these disloyal places, similarly believed her reasoning was sound. Pioneers out in Galbadia’s Centran outposts were already halfway to completing her plan, declaring their Deling-funded communities new nations, urging separation from the mother city.

But shortsighted Catkin had never predicted Adel.

Brutal, uncontrollable, and wicked, the sorceress had torn through the Estharian continent, crushing whole populations that had opposed her. She’d driven the Estharian Shumi to their cousins in Trabia, obliterated tribespeople who’d traded peaceably with Esthar for centuries, and was now making incursions into Centra and even across the oceans, to the Eastern and Southern reaches of the Galbadian continent. Her hunger for power was insatiable, her evil unmatched.

And the only force that could stop her was a united Galbadia.

So callow Catkin was proven wrong. The twilight of the empire wasn't upon them. Far from it, by some miracle, the good people of Galbadia realized they had to band together. Vincenza III, at the young age of twenty, saw her mother carted off to a care facility, a small sacrifice to make for her people. And then she and her brother Vinzer set about reforming the army, routing out dissident cowards who wouldn’t fight, and making plans. For what? The Sorceress War, of course. The Delings were visionaries, and they knew, even before the war had been formally declared, that they had to unite the continent, make of all these squabbling city-states a power that could withstand Adel’s magic and superior technology.

Catkin was routed from her newspaper office and offered a chance to join the army. But she chose instead to evade her military duty. No surprise there. She retreated not to Dollet, which was the cultural if not political heart of the empire and therefore a patriotic town. Instead she went to Timber, a place in very real danger because its rail lines stretched across the ocean to Esthar, and holed up to wait out the war. Her warlord’s anger, her fury at Galbadia, hadn't abated. She took up with a crew of similar-minded folk, newspapermen, and preached Timberi separatism even in the face of Adel.

While a few sensible Timberi understood Adel’s threat and cleaved to Galbadia, Catkin sowed discord among the majority. She peppered her newspaper – ostensibly a politically neutral outlet with a focus on travel and the arts – with ‘warnings’ against Galbadian supremacy and what she felt might happen should Deling City seize control after the war.

_And what no one ever tells us_ , put in Siren, _Is that she wasn’t_ wrong _._

To keep the peace, Vinzer Deling, acting for his sister, cracked down on Timber, urging them to see the light and unite with the rest of the continent. And a few did. Timberi soldiers fought against Adel, even if many were conscripted unwillingly, and Timberi blood was shed in Centra and the South just the same as anyone else’s. But even then, some Timberi remained bitter. Angry, prideful, stupid. They saw themselves as too good for the rest of the continent. They preferred to ally themselves with wretched, cruel Esthar, those distant cousins of theirs in the thrall of the sorceress, rather than bend the knee even once to greater Galbadia.

These became Catkin’s men. A network of backstabbing, honorless Timberi, they fought alongside good, united Galbadians in many a regiment, but all the while they were sending information back to Catkin, and Catkin? Was sending it across the rails to Esthar.

_Her real flaw is that it wouldn’t make a difference, in the end. Esthar or Galbadia. Adel or Deling._ said Siren.

“No, she was pretty sure even Adel wouldn’t be so bad. What Missy’s not saying,” Irvine thought, “Or what Missy doesn’t know, maybe. Is what Vinzer Deling was doing to Timber, to get those men to fight. It’s why he built the damn D-District in the first place, really. To hold their families, and to set up a hostage group, captive Timberi to build his weapons, craft his bombs. “

_…!_

“Yeah,” Irvine thought. “It’s a pretty story, the way she tells it. But you have to see both sides.”

So Catkin orchestrated a web of informants who had little love for the country protecting them, who sold themselves to Adel’s spymasters. And for a time it worked. Catkin herself, undercover as a normal reporter, went undetected; and her men became fanatics in her name, determined to use the war to end the Galbadian alliance at all costs, even at the cost of takeover by Adel.

Until a middling general by the name of Caraway (possibly they knew him?) should intercept one of their communications. Grim and quiet and not terribly personable, Caraway was nevertheless a die-hard patriot, a man who dreamt of United Galbadia and who became committed to tracking down each and every traitor and seeing them punished.

Caraway’s men killed a fair few, those that resisted. But overall they were merciful. Caraway’s sweetheart was Timberi by birth, and the general had a soft spot for her countrymen by extension. So Catkin and the bulk of her men became political prisoners. Loyal Dollet, Catkin’s old hometown, agreed to host them on the far north coast, where they could do no harm. Then, after the war was over and the threat of Adel gone, they could turn over the prisoners to Deling City for a trial.

Catkin’s men spent the latter half of the war in the strongest fortification Dollet had to offer: the old Dolletian castle that stood where the continent met the Northern peninsula. Conditions there were probably better than they deserved. The castle was ancient, but secure and imposing. It still recalled the days when the statesmen of old, dukes and kings, princesses and sorceresses clad all in red, had argued forcefully with the people of Dollet for the dream of a united Galbadian continent. It was a fitting place to put these traitors. Not a cruel place. But simply one that would remind them, at every step, that they were fighting against an inevitability.

It is said that, when Adel mysteriously vanished and Esthar retreated, Catkin’s men didn't celebrate. They stormed their guards, demanded to be set free. They'd lost, but they wanted to take Galbadia down in any way possible. The Dolletians radioed Deling City, terrified that Catkin and her men would escape and wreak havoc on their small seaside town.

Vincenza Deling herself came out with a force of soldiers a hundred strong. They sought to put down the rebellion, and take Catkin and her men to the D-District prison for trial. But, somehow, perhaps through some illicit connection, Catkin had gotten hold of a bomb. When Vincenza arrived and attempted to talk sense into the rebels, she detonated it, killing Vincenza, herself, her men, and anyone in a five hundred meter radius.

The only reason anyone knew what had happened was because the residents of Dollet had seen the smoke go up, and pieced together the story in the days afterwards.

_So Catkin died rather than go to the D-District?_ said Siren.

“Can you blame her?” Irvine thought.

Now all that was left of the original castle was a hole in the earth, and a great expanse of blackened, sooty dirt in the North, stretching out in all directions. A piece of original, beautiful Galbadian heritage was lost. Vincenza, most brilliant of the Delings, was gone. The heads of Dollet and Timber submitted themselves to a loose association with Deling City after this, almost more out of humiliation than genuine thanks for the Galbadian army’s defense of them during the war, and the alliance settled back into an uneasy peace for the most part, interrupted only by bands of rebels who were stupid enough to see more than death and betrayal in Catkin’s horrible, honorless suicide run.

-

So that was Missy’s story. 

Selphie thought she could detect a bias.

-

When Raijin was pulled back into his own head, the sorceress wasn’t there. Another girl, one with perfectly nice brown eyes, was sitting in her place. She nodded to someone just out of sight. She said, “Shoo, shoo, bad bedside manner.”

It took Raijin a few moments to process this.

Every bone in his body hurt. Before he’d been expelled from his own mind, he’d been hurting for so long that he’d no longer really felt it. But now he did feel it. It came roaring back. Pain from his ribs, wrists, knees, and ankles. His left cheekbone felt bruised and raw. The skin on his back had come off. He’d nearly bitten through his tongue.

“Hey,” said the new girl. “She’s gone. It’s just me. Listen. Listen. I think I know a way to get Seifer back.”

Raijin was so disoriented that for a minute he couldn’t understand why they’d want to bring Seifer back. They’d only be bringing him back _here_. He worked his way around the gumminess in his mouth, and said this.

The girl rolled her eyes. “So he can rescue you, and the two of you can go get your Garden. That Garden's what we need. People are starting to say things about it, you know. People are starting to _know_.”


	8. Chapter 8

“I’ve got to tell you, Missy,” Selphie said, once Missy had concluded her story, “That hardly seems like an impartial account.”

Selphie, Irvine reflected, always got down to the truth of things. That was one of her many excellent traits, the others being all her other traits.

But Missy just shrugged. She said, “I fly the Cactus Jack, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. The truth as I see it is Galbadian. And the fact is, things between Galbadia and Timber are much more complicated than Rin makes them out to be."

“She’s half Timberi. I think if anyone sees the whole picture, it’s her,” Selphie said.

“She’s tugged in two directions,” said Missy. “You try seeing everything when you’re that split in half.”

Not that Missy saw everything, Irvine thought. She clearly didn’t feel it was at all strange that Vincenza Deling had disappeared just as Vinzer had come of age to take the presidency himself, on Dolletian lands where it would fall to Dollet to sort things out, and with a parcel of starving, isolated Timberi prisoners to take the fall for the whole thing.

Mighty convenient, that.

Vinzer Deling must have had some fine operatives back in the day. SeeD couldn’t have set up a better result for him. _Martine_ couldn’t have.

They passed the G-Hotel. Missy took them down a side street, then pulled up to the curb and set her permits on the dashboard before stepping out of the car.

“This is it,” she said, gesturing at a building tucked behind a small cobbled courtyard a few meters away.

It was an elegant little building, perfectly circular and domed, almost like a bank, but with few accouterments, no faux-Acenath columns, only one large round doorway leading inside. The sign for a perfume shop hung in the courtyard, but when Missy stepped through the door the salesgirl at the counter took one look at her and waved them through to the back. They descended a spiral staircase hung with globular, eerie green lamps and notches lit by blue crystals. At the bottom, a dark-haired man in nondescript tan manned the door. He nodded once to Missy, demanded to see Selphie’s papers, which she produced (false, supplied by Xu, but then he didn’t know that). Then, oddly enough, he simply waved Irvine through.

Oh.

_You’ve been here before_ , Siren said.

He didn’t remember it. At all. It must have been with someone, someone in the know, someone he also couldn’t remember right now.

“Do you have the memory?” he thought at Siren.

_I have mostly random monster battles,_ she informed him sulkily. _And one or two interesting things, but not very many. That’s all you said I could have. I’d like something a little more riveting._

“What’s the deal with that?” Selphie asked Irvine, as they passed down a long, dimly-lit corridor that sloped down, down, down.

“Ah,” Irvine said, running a hand through his hair. “Well—“

“He’s been here before, obviously,” said Missy, from in front of them. “Though I wish he’d told me that before I offered to drive you here.”

“I don’t remember,” Irvine clarified, more for Selphie’s benefit than hers.

“Oh, were you drinking?” Missy said, sounding unsurprised. “Well, you are Galbadia’s most famous person right now, just as she’s Trabia’s. So naturally you’re going to want to let loose a little bit.”

The way she said that, blithely, easily – the part about Irvine being Galbadia’s most famous person. That shocked him.

Because it really hit him for what seemed like the first time.

Rinoa was probably equally famous. Infamous. They were both infamous. And Irvine had always enjoyed a certain low-level infamy. But not like this. It was one thing to be the wisecracking loner, irresistible to women, there at night and gone by daybreak. It was quite another to see this fantasy blown up, distorted, transformed into the byword for a depraved lifestyle.

He thought of Rill Tremlett. He'd put Rill out of his mind for the time being, put the pictures out of his mind—

_You gave them to me,_ Siren said. _Don't worry. I was incensed and humiliated and angry on your behalf._

This...this was the thing. About Irvine. And his memories. Right after the war, his friends had wanted to know why he didn't tell them right off, why he'd seemed upset over their forgetting, which of course they couldn't help. Why he'd made a secret of their time at the orphanage, a memory that they all could have shared and that belonged to all of them.

And the truth was, he'd assumed they'd given their time at the orphanage to the GFs. Knowingly. On purpose. He'd assumed that they'd figured out that you could give away memories deliberately. Why not? He had, and he had less experience with GFs than they did. So he'd simply believed that they, like him, had willingly and consciously traded away their pasts. Specifically, those parts of their pasts that hadn't meant anything to them and hadn't been valuable. For Irvine, the most valuable moments in his life had been the orphanage, so he'd kept those. Whereas for the others -- cheerful Selphie, team captain Squall, perfect SeeD Quistis, and beloved son Zell -- maybe the orphanage hadn't meant as much. Maybe Irvine hadn't meant as much. So obviously they'd just given him away.

So he’d covered up his memory trade-offs. He'd just told them that as far as he knew there were no GFs at G-garden, he'd only junctioned until recently, that was why. Why he alone remembered them.

Not because he'd traded away bits and pieces of his life to keep them.

Only now this lie loomed large and obvious. There were G-garden cadets advocating GF use among a highly patriotic subset of the most expansionist empire on the planet. The most dangerous city on the planet, from Balamb Garden's perspective. The city Irvine should know a lot about. And maybe if Irvine had been a little bit more honest or a little bit less reckless with his memory trade-offs, he could have helped them avoid this mess.

He wondered which GF Ruta's cadet had a hold of. There weren't many he could think of that hadn't eventually made it to Balamb. Atomos? No. He could swear Xu had assigned that one to a SeeD cleaning up monsters in Esthar. Of course, he would have known for sure if he'd just bothered to come clean to Xu. It was one thing to lie between friends. Another to be dishonest to a Garden superior.

He thought of Rill Tremlett, of the images in the magazine.

Maybe he deserved to have his past blow up in his face. He felt sick, unhappy that anyone, from people he loved, like Selphie, to people he'd just met today, like Missy, could walk to the nearest shop and purchase a five page spread on his past, his stupid decisions, his romantic failures, his vulnerability, and every inch of his prepubescent self. He felt something he hoped desperately he'd never wrought on anybody else: he felt contaminated.

Giving away his memories had always been a way to keep himself as pure and happy as he’d been at the orphanage. Carefree. Not weighed down. It was second nature at this point to pass off the overwhelming discomfort he felt in thinking of Rill to Siren. The moment it became a memory, he let her lay claim to it. Take it off his mind. But he couldn't keep it from intruding on his life again, not when it was plastered on the newsstands. And he couldn't erase the part of him that wasn't memories, that was just some lonely loser from the outskirts, and that would always, always feel the bile rise in his throat now, when he was reminded that his sexual experiences cost ten gil at the item shop. There was a core part of him that was angry and humiliated. And he could try to shove the memories of that humiliation at the GFs. But he couldn't get rid of his gut reaction.

And obviously he wouldn't be able to keep the world from shoving his worst behavior in his face.

"Irvy,” Selphie put in at this point. “Are you alright?”

He tipped his cap. He was fine. Fine. Perfect.

This was probably another opportunity to be honest here, to let her know that Irvine Kinneas, the grown up incarnation of Irvine her friend, was a bit more cracked below the surface than he let on. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. The words dried up in his throat.

They reached the end of the corridor. The man at the inner door waved them all in after sizing them up and demanding a (very hefty) cover charge. And then –

A low cavern, painted with frolicking historical figures: naked Nah, sexually-posed Acenath. Many branching rooms off to the side, each dimly lit and warm and smoky, with people passing in and out, laughing. Someone was playing a tinkling melody at a piano, and in front of them a girl in nothing but nipple pasties was taking people’s coats. The central room here was lit again by those blue crystals, and Selphie and Missy’s faces became strangely alien in the light. There was tonberry dust on a table to their right, being weighed and parceled out as if it were no illegal substance, just some light recreation. From the cavern on their left came a party of people dressed up like Shumi, though they were clearly not Shumi. One dropped her robe to reveal a bikini, to shrieking applause and laughter

“I’ll find you Tulip,” Missy said, looking uncomfortable in her Gryphon Preparatory cardigan and schoolgirl skirt. “She’s bound to be around here somewhere. You know, she’s not a very upright girl.”

“Isn’t she? Shocking,” said Selphie. “Well, at least she’s fun.”

Selphie was regarding the proceedings with some interest. Trabia wasn't known for its club scene. More for its scenic lakes and white-capped mountains and for healthy pursuits like skiing and ice skating and that weird old-person sport where you strapped flat baskets to your feet and tromped around in snow. Walking. That was it.

“How come you’ve never taken me here?” she asked Irvine, once Missy had darted off to find Tulip Ruta.

“I didn’t remember that I’d been here!” said Irvine.

Selphie poked him. “Well, someplace like it, then,” she said.

It had never occurred to him. He’d thrown up a divider in his mind between wholesome, innocent, perfect Selphie and every other relationship in his life, which had largely been conducted out of smoke-filled rooms like these, and which had ended abruptly when people realized he was a consummate liar and an emotional coward. 

Luckily, before he could come up with something to explain this, Missy appeared. She was dragging a long-faced brunette with deep-set green eyes and a sparkly green dress that probably cost at least 35,000 gil for its one square meter of fabric.

There was no G-Garden cadet. 

Missy lurched over a drunk, giggling young man who’d stumbled into her path, and caught hold of Selphie’s arm.

“I think they had a fight,” she hissed. “Tulip and her cadet. Not surprising. They have nothing in common.”

Tulip Ruta eyed Selphie and Irvine sulkily.

“These are Rinoa’s friends?" she said flatly. “They don’t look like they’re from Timber.”

Nice of Missy to try and provide them some kind of cover. Not strictly necessary, since they were already operating under a cover with Missy herself. But still. Good thinking. Now they had a cover story to cover the cover story. 

“You don’t seem like what I’d expect a Deling City rich girl to look like,” Selphie told Tulip chirpily. “Short skirts, dens of vice, _magic_.”

“Our local soldiers and cadets use magic all the time,” Tulip retorted.

“Some soldier or cadet get you into GFs?” said Irvine.

“Maybe,” Tulip said. She pointedly examined her nails.

Missy nudged her. “Tell them his name,” she said.

“Why?” said Tulip. Then she narrowed her eyes at them. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

There was only so much new haircuts, a different hat, and some changes of clothes could do for them. Irvine and Selphie still had faces Tulip would see whenever she strolled up to the magazine rack at the Deling City train station. But they couldn’t let that faze them. Irvine straightened up, put some no-nonsense, non-Kinneas seriousness into his face. He always tried to channel Squall when people identified him. The Commander’s overall demeanor was so unlike Irvine that it usually threw people off balance.

For her part, Selphie only had to smile extra bright. No one ever reported her as smiling. She was from Trabia Garden; people assumed she stayed in bed all day and cried.

“Do you know magic use is forbidden inside the city?” Selphie said brightly, glossing over Tulip’s question. “Funny, right? Almost like what you guys did to Timber.”

Tulip rolled her eyes.

“Please,” she said. “You people are—Why do you even care about my magic use? Why do Rinoa’s friends from Timber give an anacondaur’s ass about my magic use?”

Missy stared at them, panicky. “Well, Tul—“ she began.

But she was interrupted. Someone in one of the back rooms screamed. They heard the sound of shots, as if from a machine gun. Missy seized both Irvine and Selphie’s arms, looking frightened, and Tulip Ruta seemed to blink out of whatever drug haze she’d been in, and turned for the door.

Which was barricaded. By Deling City soldiers.

“Oh, grat poop,” Selphie said.

As SeeDs, they could technically be in the city. No problems there. But, per the ceasefire, there were only a limited number of things they could actually do here. What they’d told Caraway qualified just fine. It made them out to be bodyguards sniffing out a potential threat: normal SeeD behavior. But who knew whether sitting around in a (clearly illegal) den of vice brought them over the edge into prohibited activity?

Selphie, quick thinker that she was, grabbed Tulip Ruta with one hand, nodded to Irvine, and propelled them all in the direction of one of the rooms furthest from where the shots had come from.

“Is there a back entrance to this place that Missy wouldn’t know about?” she demanded of Tulip Ruta. “Is the army doing some kind of raid on both ends?”

Tulip shrugged uselessly, looking terrified. Irvine had only a little pity for her; if this entire mess came down to her own selfish desire to see what being a magic-user was like, then she deserved whatever came her way. But Missy he really pitied, since the poor girl didn’t have to be here. He manhandled her behind a nearby chaise lounge, garish and red, and put a finger to his lips, urging her to stay quiet in case the Deling military police burst into the room. She stared at him, shocked, but seemed to get it. Then he turned to Selphie. There was a small hidden screen in one corner, painted with more naked figures, practically blending into the wall. Selphie noticed it at the same time he did and shoved Tulip Ruta behind it, because Selphie was essentially a good person, despite her dark humor and occasional violent streak.

So Irvine, almost unthinkingly, shoved Selphie in after Tulip.

There was no room for him. He whirled around, looking for some other form of cover. There was a low bar at the other end of the room, behind which people were crouching, scared. This would be the perfect place to get in some short-range shots, if the situation deteriorated to that point. Irvine strode across to it, reached it, went to climb over it—

And someone caught him by the shoulder, kneed him in the back, right where his kidney was, and pulled him down to the floor.

It hurt like Hyne’s own curse.

Irvine blinked.

Fury Caraway stared down at him, disgusted.

Fuck. 

“I expect I’ll find Rinoa around here,” he said, so slowly and deliberately and softly that it sounded like some threat out of an old movie, the knight making good on a promise to destroy all who opposed his beloved sorceress. Which. The guy was talking about his daughter, so. Gross.

“This hardly seems like protecting her,” Caraway continued, “Coming to a place like this. We received a tip that a G-Garden threat was here. But the only G-Garden cadet I’m seeing here is… You.”

Well, they’d gotten the same tip he had, obviously. This was easy enough to clear up. Irvine opened his mouth to say this. Caraway kicked him in the side. While he was _down_.

Fucking _Hyne_. He kicked like his daughter did. Hard.

“If you’ve hidden an innocent Galbadian girl from a good family here,” Caraway said easily, “I will have your head.”

He was clearly talking about Rinoa, and thankfully Rinoa was not here. But suddenly it occurred to Irvine that poor Missy Spaiss _was_. He looked to his right, to where she was hiding behind the divan, almost on reflex.

Caraway hauled him to his feet.

“You have a tic,” he told Irvine easily.

“Excuse me?” Irvine forced out, still somewhat shocked by all the kicking. And kidney punching. And totalitarian crackdown-ing.

“A tic,” Caraway said. “When I mentioned my daughter. You looked to the right.”

Oh. Hyne the Divine. Caraway was a general now. But way back when he’d been a spy-catcher, too. So of course he’d notice your reflexes, the things even you didn’t know you were doing.

“Check behind that divan,” Caraway demanded.

“Rinoa’s not there!” Irvine said.

No use. Caraway’s men kicked over the divan, and revealed a very terrified Missy. Poor Missy.

“Nice company you’re keeping, Miss Spaiss,” Caraway said. He sounded surprised, but that leached out of his tone quickly enough when he added, “Rinoa’s influence, no doubt.”

“N-no—“ Missy forced out. “She teleported. Ages ago.”

Caraway blinked. He probably had no idea his daughter could do that. To be fair, his daughter couldn’t. It was just some lie of Selphie’s. 

Fuck. Selphie. What if Caraway asked after Selphie? What if he asked after Selphie and Irvine, stupid traitorous Irvine with his tics, led Caraway straight to her? Caraway was clearly not in a forgiving mood right now, or even in much of a mood to listen, and Irvine didn’t like the thought of Selphie in the hands of a man like that.

Selphie was joy, and laughter on a beach, and the pure snow of Trabia. She wasn't there to be manhandled or kidney-punched. She wasn't what Caraway would undoubtedly classify her as: upstart Garden trash.

“Take Miss Spaiss to the Commissioner’s office. Call her parents,” Caraway ordered. Missy squeaked. She was led away.

“There was another one of you,” Caraway said, after a minute.

And somehow, Irvine’s brain – all those firing neurons he couldn’t control – came up with the plan before Irvine’s mind—that is, the sensible inner part of him that directed the GFs – could offer any input.

It was a fairly simple plan. To protect Selphie.

_Oh,_ Siren said, echoing this plan. _Of course I can take every moment she spent with you today. Not a problem._

And then, suddenly, Selphie was gone. Not all of her. Just her today. Whatever she’d done alongside him. Wherever she was right now. He knew she had to be somewhere, just as he knew she’d been assigned to this mission with him, had boarded the train with them yesterday, had doubtlessly reached the city at the same time he and Rinoa had.

There was just a vague, fuzzy block around all his memories today. He wasn’t even sure what they’d discovered. He could recall everything Missy had said to him directly; he still knew they had a G-Garden kid running around with GFs. He could even recall Tulip Ruta’s sulky face. But where was Tulip now? With Selphie? She had to be. Because her location was missing. It was in the wooly hole in his head, the one Siren had left behind when she’d yanked out his recent experiences with his girlfriend.

“Where is SeeD Tilmitt?” demanded General Caraway.

And Irvine honestly didn’t know. He shrugged.

Caraway sneered at him, disgust etched into his features.

“You know, once I pulled you out of some trouble at the D-District,” Caraway told Irvine. “It made sense at the time. Martine’s notes on you said you had…connections there. I wanted to do you a favor, a nice Deling boy like you. Getting arrested would have been a blow to your poor father.”

Irvine had very little affection for his adoptive father, so he shrugged again. 

“Clearly I was too kind,” Caraway noted. “You dragged my daughter back there anyway.”

No, he hadn’t. She’d kicked him down a flight of stairs, and then dragged _him_. But, taking the measure of Fury Caraway, Irvine decided he wouldn’t reveal that because firstly he didn’t think it would help him. Caraway clearly already thought Irvine was scum and there would be little changing his mind on that account. And, secondly, Irvine felt bad enough for Rinoa for having to deal with this guy all her life. She didn’t need him making it worse by pointing out her misbehavior and making Caraway even more viciously overprotective than he already was.

“Take him to the D-District,” Caraway said, shoving him at some soldiers. He was a very, very strong man, Irvine realized belatedly. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he was. Irvine, six feet tall and no petite flower in terms of weight, was propelled backwards by the force of Caraway’s push and practically shoved into the arms of his captors. He blinked, somewhat dazed.

And was stunned to see an equally dazed Tulip Ruta appear behind Caraway and a squadron of Caraway’s soldiers. Seemingly out of nowhere. Just out of the lewdly painted wall or something.

“Um,” she said. She sounded scared stiff. “SeeD Kinneas didn’t do anything wrong. He was just meeting me here. To get a tip on the G-Garden cadet illegally using magic. The one that might hurt Rinoa. The cadet’s name is Hobbs. Hobbs Worth.” She smiled. Not a pretty smile. Lips parting, teeth firmly clenched in nervousness. It looked like she was hiding shards of glass in her mouth.

_Hobbs Worth_? Siren said. _Him?_

It didn’t make sense to Irvine either. 

“Miss Ruta,” Caraway said, plainly aghast. “Well. I can’t say I’m pleased to find two of you girls here. Same routine as with Miss Spaiss.” He waved Tulip in the direction of one of his men. Tulip shrunk a bit, but went where he’d gestured. The soldier led her away. 

“This one can still spend the night at the D-District,” Caraway said, pointing at Irvine once she’d gone. 

“What?” Irvine said, dismayed. “She just confirmed that I was only doing the same thing you are! Protecting Rinoa!” 

“With the kind of people Rinoa brings home,” Caraway said lightly, “You’d be spending the night in my house otherwise. I can’t say I like that. And I think it’s time I commandeered her little mission. She didn’t need to hire SeeDs. I’m her father. I can look after her. And now that I have Mr. Worth’s name, it should go smoothly enough.” 

Which. That still didn’t make any sense. Hobbs Worth had been in some of Irvine’s classes. Hobbs Worth was— 

“Cast sleep,” Caraway ordered. 

Irvine didn’t get to finish the thought. He was out like a light. 

He woke up in a cell, and most of the muscles in his body hurt. Siren was buzzing excitedly in his brain for some reason, but Irvine didn’t get a chance to pay much attention to her, because a very familiar face was staring down at him. An eternally-swollen face. Red. With thinning brown hair and a sparse brown mustache and permanent bags underneath the watery blue eyes, and a look of complete dissatisfaction. 

“Caraway’s ordered us to ship you back to your SeeDs in Balamb,” Bexley said, by way of greeting. 

Well. Hyne hid a ray of sunshine in every shitpile, they said. 

“But not ‘til mornin’,” Bexley continued. “He said I could keep you ‘til then. Which I will. We should talk.”

“I’d rather not,” Irvine said.

“You know what people are printin’ about you?” Bexley said.

Well, he hadn’t been thinking about it, but now he was. Thanks, Bexley.

“You know how humiliated I am?” Bexley said. “First you don’t come home after the War—“

“It’s not my home anymore,” Irvine said. “It’s a pretty crap home.”

“Sleep your way across Esthar,” Bexley said, ignoring him. “Dirty-minded like you are. Then you take up with this poor girl outta Trabia, who you’re probably no good for. You fuck up the lives of the people around you, y’know. You did it to me. Gonna do it to this girl. Gonna do it to—“

Hobbs Worth. The next name on Caraway’s black list. It flashed into Irvine’s mind right then. He tuned Bexley out.

_You think Worth is in trouble,_ Siren said.

And Irvine did. Because. Because it occurred to him, right then, that something was rotten. Tulip Ruta had pegged Worth as some kind of magic user, their rebel right in Deling City; and Missy had given the impression, from what he could remember of the library and the car ride to the club, that Tulip’s cadet was dissatisfied with the status quo. But that was wrong. It was off.

Hobbs Worth had never been dissatisfied a day in his life. He’d been a born follower, just how Martine liked them. Someone who never raised a fuss, who balked at no orders, who never thought for himself. The ideal Garden cadet. Irvine, an outsider who Martine had very much disliked, had thought little of Worth. Worth bent at the knee to every power above him, to Martine and to his clients and to any Deling official he happened to meet. And as a result he’d always been rewarded. You scratch my back; I kill grats for you. The Deling City way. So no. This wasn’t right. Worth had never had reason to be dissatisfied. Or to break the rules.

Their rebel magic user? Couldn’t be Worth. Irvine was sure of it.

-

The decommissioned SeeD transport bobbed just below the waters off the coast of Dollet. It stayed there for some time; during the hours the Dolletians were most likely to discover it, the high fishing hours of the morning and afternoon. At the early evening siesta in which the Dolletians all retired to their homes to nap and the streets fell empty, coincidentally the same hour in which Irvine Kinneas was being arrested by the Galbadian military police, the transport came to the surface. Cid had programmed it to arrive at this time. No one would be around to notice it.

The transport stayed put long enough to let off its passenger. This person stumbled out, limping. They left behind the blanket and most of the bandages. They took the battered long grey coat, and somehow wrapped it around themselves in such a way that it became a strange banner, a defiant flag fluttering behind them in the wind.

They went to the house of the sorceress. Very few people knew that Dollet’s sorceress was a sorceress. She wasn’t crazy enough to reveal it to anyone.

She simply went by Rellia, the Card Queen.

She answered the knock at the door and saw the coat first.

“ _You_ ,” she snarled. But then she caught sight of the person under the coat.

They weren’t who she was expecting to see.

“Honey, you’d better come in,” she said.

-

“Arrested,” Xu said to Selphie Tilmitt.

“Yeah…” Selphie said. She was in a seedy bar in the outskirts. After putting the fear of Hyne into Tulip Ruta to get her to reveal the name of their SeeD cadet and to confess to Caraway in the process, in the vain hope that this might keep Irvine from being sent to prison, Selphie had stayed crouched behind her concealed screen for an hour, as the police arrested the people at the bar and all horrible totalitarian activity slowly died down.

Then she’d crept out of town in the vain hope that she might find a car rental that didn’t report you to the government, so that she could head out to the desert. Because there was no _way_ she was going to let Irvy rot in prison. She’d helped take down the old D-District. She could take down the new, rebuilt one as well.

“And Rinoa?” Xu asked, as if half-fearful of the answer. “I only ask because we have to keep tabs on her. Not because she’s a SeeD.”

“Er,” Selphie said. “Still AWOL. Technically.”

“AWOL,” Xu said.

“AWOL,” Selphie confirmed.

Xu said something that sounded impossibly romantic because it was in Dolletian-accented old Nah. But by now Selphie had known Xu long enough to realize that when she lapsed into one of her mother tongues, it was only because she was letting the Headmistress façade slip long enough to curse like a sailor. 

“I’ll negotiate with the D-district,” Xu forced out, when she was done cursing. “You—you get back in the city. Find us our missing sorceress.”

She sounded incredibly put-upon to be ordering the retrieval of Rinoa, a girl whose safety was, on paper, Garden’s top priority. Off paper, Rinoa was someone Xu had attempted to flush out of Garden multiple times. She made no secret of the fact that she found Rinoa incredibly obnoxious.

Selphie preferred Rinoa to Xu. Rinoa was her friend; Xu was simply her boss. But she still felt a little bad for Xu. Xu had an uncompromising temperament and a thankless job. This was not a great combo if you wanted to cut back on work-related stress.

“Maybe Squall’s mission is going better,” Selphie said, by way of comfort.

“There’s no way,” Xu said, as evenly as she could probably manage, “That it could be going any worse than yours.”

-

“This is the worst mission I’ve ever been on in my life,” Zell told Quistis, when they were staked out alone on the far side of the sinkhole. “It's boring. And hot. It’s really freakin’ hot.”

Quistis could concur on both points. They were doing very little today. Just observing, measuring the sinkhole, taking notes on the environment, photographing what they could, and relaying the images to their Ancient Centran expert back at Garden. After their experiences defeating Ultimecia, something like this was almost an extension of their vacation.

Except that no one ever went to the Kashkabald for a vacation. The Kashkabald in daytime meant skin-peeling heat so powerful you could actually feel yourself roasting. Occasionally, the thermostat here even climbed up to heat so stifling you thought your eyeballs might be melting in their sockets.

Squall, with the impersonal care of a true leader, kept offering her water in order to combat the heat. Zell did the same, though he probably did it less because Quistis was a valued member of the team and they couldn’t have her dying of dehydration, and more because his mother back in Balamb had taught him that it was important to care about others, and that boys who let girls die of thirst deserved to be sharply cuffed on the back of the head.

Quistis didn’t actually need that much water, though?

She was a Blue Mage. The ability to survive tough conditions came with the territory. It took a lot to dehydrate her. 

She’d discovered her Blue Magic when she was ten. A junk trader had come into town with a whole range of curiosities he’d picked up across the Galbadian continent. Necklaces of fire opals from the desert; curious books of genealogy from the weird Winhill area, where women took _men_ ’s names; antiquated tech from suburban Deling City; old magazines from Timber; and bizarre rocks, caked with dust and shaped like little people, from the North where the Kalevan had once lived. Quistis’ adoptive parents hadn't liked her talking to people like this; they were Dolletian old money, which meant a good last name but actually very little money. Still, they’d believed she had to keep a distance from Dolletian no money, which was basically everyone in Dollet, and also everybody from outside Dollet until you hit Deling City, particularly trash like junk traders.

But Quistis had talked to the junk trader. She’d wanted to buy something. She’d had her own money by then. She’d earned it, because she’d always kept busy as a child. She’d discovered early on that working at something, filling up your day with things to do, could stave off moodiness and insecure thoughts. You just had to…tire yourself out. So that was exactly what she’d done. She’d taken paper routes, delivered fruit from street vendors to buyers at the radio tower, collected and sold seashells by the waterfront. Her parents were already slightly dissatisfied with her – she simply wasn’t a _lovable_ child, they said; it was good to be pretty, but something about this one’s prettiness was just not lovable— so it was nothing to them if she disappeared for some time each day. So she had. In that time, she’d earned her pocket money as Dollet’s go-to girl for nondescript errands. She could afford to purchase some junk, now and then, and she’d purchased one of those funny Kalevan rocks.

It looked like a little stone man. The rounded top was his bald head. The vast middle was his barrel chest. The excrescences on the sides? His powerful arms. The notch near the top was his grin, something halfway between merry and sad. He'd seemed sad somehow. Quistis had liked him. He’d cost two gil.

She’d taken him down a side street after purchasing him, and come across the Painter Gang.

The Painter Gang ruled Dollet’s streets. Until Quistis had come on the scene, they’d had a monopoly on just about every single child-friendly task you could earn money at. They ran childish card rackets, sold milk in the square, washed windows, and had once reigned supreme at the seashell trade. Once. Until Quistis had shown up. They didn't like her; she was, to their mind, snooty and horrible. And they were a band of backstreets ruffians who wouldn't make friends with her, perhaps because, sometime between Centra and her encounter with the junk trader, Quistis had lost her ability to really relate to or make friends with children her own age.

The Painter Gang cornered her and clearly intended to rough her up. Their ringleader was an older girl, sharp and dangerous, and she had a cousin and a brother and another cousin and a baby sister, and every last one of these was slightly more hard-edged and ambitious than she was, so Quistis had never had any idea how she managed to keep them under control. But she had. Possibly by constantly setting them on scapegoats like the pretty rich girl who thought she could muscle in on their territory.

So they’d come at her. And she’d clutched her little rock man, frightened out of her wits, and suddenly felt him grow very, very hot.

There was magic in him. Blue magic. Specifically, a very small defensive spell, which threw up a kind of shield in front of her. The Painter Gang ran right into it. They smacked their childish heads, and blood dripped from their noses, and they screamed and ran to tell their parents, and before you knew it? Everyone in Dollet knew that Saffir and Lina Trepe’s adoptive daughter was a Blue Mage.

Even Saffir and Lina Trepe, who consorted with very few ordinary Dolletians, somehow chanced to learn it, possibly because some of their less well-named but incredibly resentful neighbors had taken pains to tell them about it, wanting to see their faces when they learned that the pretty, well-behaved child they’d purchased was _defective_.

Blue Magic wasn’t as bad as sorceress magic, obviously. But it was still magic. Inhuman. Not right. Worse than para magic, which was something for soldiers, who at least had the excuse that casting helped them fight Esthar. But blue magic… Blue magic was sure proof that the girl who possessed it might be a sorceress candidate. That is, she might have a tendency to go savage, soak in the wickedness of Hyne’s profane magical half.

Lina had gone to Quistis’ bedroom that very night, which was a thing she never did, and had grabbed Quistis’ hairbrush and begun to brush Quistis’ hair, which was also a thing she never did. Which was a good thing. Because she hadn’t been very good at it. She didn’t brush so much as she _pulled_. Angrily. Hard.

“Do you know what Blue Magic is?” she’d said, as she did this.

Quistis had not.

“It’s something the Shumi of the East had,” Lina had told her. “Not something people have. Not even something the Shumi who live close by in the North have. It’s for Estharian Shumi. Evil Eastern monsters. Do you know how it gets into a person?”

“Ow,” was all Quistis had been able to say, because her hair was being pulled so often and so hard that at this point there were tears in her eyes.

Lina brought her mouth down to Quistis’ ear. Quistis could see her face in the mirror. Lina looked very like she did, enough that people might have assumed she was Quistis’ natural mother if she and Saffir hadn’t run around telling them straight-out that Saffir had suffered injuries in the war and they’d had to adopt. But Quistis’ face had never looked as simultaneously gleeful and furious as Lina’s did right then. Lina said, “Blue magic came into the human bloodstream when the Estharians went to destroy their local Shumi villages. And do you know what they did? Before they killed the Shumi, they found the Shumi’s hidden women. And they raped them. And they forced them to give birth to the babies, to give to Adel so that Adel could devour their blue magic. And then—“

Here she yanked Quistis’s hair particularly hard.

“I guess one or two escaped. And tricked the people who adopted them into thinking they were a nice, human, Dolletian child.”

Quistis did look Dolletian. The original, best flavor of Galbadian. Blue eyes, Western-pale in their color, nothing like the black-eyed wickedness of the Estharians. Hair too fair to come from the rest of the Galbadian continent – it had to be from old Dollet. The whole package. But Saffir and Lina had always suspected the package was leaky or faulty; that the blonde wasn't properly golden but little too much like the wheat-coloring of certain savage groups of Esthar. And anyway they’d never made any secret of the fact that it was the wrong package altogether. Really they’d wanted a boy, who would be less open to receiving any magic of any kind, but the only properly blond, light-eyed Dolletian-seeming boy left at the orphanage when they’d gotten there had been such a horrible little ogre that they had no _choice_ but to accept second-best.

Well, now second-best had proven to be completely worthless.

They’d called Cid Kramer and enrolled Quistis in B-Garden the next day. She would have gone to G-Garden, but for the fact that they knew people who sent their children there, and if Quistis had gone to school with those children they might have had to hear about her down the line, and they would have had to accept that she had not, in fact, evaporated into nothing as soon as they’d decided they didn’t want her.

They’d changed their minds in recent months. Really famous people like Fury Caraway had turned out to have magic daughters. It was in fashion now. And Quistis herself was on magazine stands looking very photogenic. Quistis was a household name, something one might be able to make money off of. It seemed her adoptive parents done just that. The Trepies had invited them to Garden just before Quistis had gone on vacation. They’d shown up in one of her classes, Lina in fur and Saffir wearing a watch that must have cost at least a few thousand gil. They’d tried to talk to her afterwards; she’d told them (keeping her cool all the while) that she was busy. Then some photographer who’d snuck past the guy at the gate had taken pictures, and Quistis had fled up to Xu’s office, and then? She’d had a small mental breakdown.

Small. Very small. Not even tears or anything, since Quistis hadn’t had a serious crying fit since she’d been eight and the Painter Gang ringleader had yanked off a good chunk of her hair in a skirmish.

“You’re going on vacation,” Xu had said, without bothering to look up from her paperwork.

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” Quistis had said, her face buried in her hands. “I’ll clock my time in at some point. But this month I still have a para-magic class to sketch out for Frecht; he can’t plan his classes to save his life, and—”

“That was not a request,” Xu had said. “I'll throw you out of here if I have to. Don’t make me have people bodily escort you to the door. It’ll make Squall storm in here in a huff like he owns the place. And then I’ll have to put _him_ on vacation.” She stopped, considered this. “No,” she said, suddenly blissful. “You know what? You’re _all_ on vacation. Oh. Oh, yeah.”

This was the thing about Xu. It was hard to see her as a friend, a real friend, because usually she only helped you when it was convenient for her to do so, when it fell in line with what she thought Garden needed. That made her an able replacement for Cid, but not really someone you wanted to unload your deepest secrets onto. Even so, she somehow seemed to grasp that Quistis’ life wasn’t in the best place right now. And she had (buried deep, deep down) some sympathy for her. So she was helping Quistis out rather a lot.

“Hey,” Zell said suddenly, looking up from his vidphone and startling Quistis out of her walk down (unhappy) memory lane. It was permissible for her to tune out like this only because just now she was mechanically taking measurements of the top of the pit, the width of the stairs, and any strange markings they came across: a job that required very limited brainpower. Cid said the pit wouldn’t disappear until sundown, so it wasn’t even like she had to hurry.

Zell was assigned to photos and communication with their Garden contact. It was a task no harder than the one Quistis had, but apparently it gave him pause. He said, “Do you think Xu knows what she’s doing, giving us this kid as our contact?” He showed her the name on his phone – it came up automatically, with all relevant data attached, per the new Garden network. Nida. Huh.

“Zell, it’s Nida,” she pointed out.

“…who?” Zell said.

Okay. She knew GF memory loss could be bad. But this was ridiculous. “You graduated with him,” Quistis said. “And I know for a fact that you two were in my class together. I partnered you for the project on field tactics once!”

“…you mean the kid that flies the Garden?” Zell said. He said this the way young children often said, ‘You mean that boy who picks his nose and eats paper?’ Which was rich, coming from Zell. He’d once _been_ the kid who picked his nose and ate paper.

“If Xu assigned him to us, then he’s the one for the job,” Quistis said.

“He keeps geekin’ out on me, though,” Zell complained. “I love history. You know I love history. But, like, useful stuff. Stuff that shows you people you might have known, people your grandparents’ age, all the pieces that had to fall into line for you to exist. Not dead languages and weird ancient cults and human sacrifice and sorceresses. You know what I know about Ancient Centrans all of a sudden? Everything. That they ate bitter chocolate smeared on tonberry flesh. That they wore loincloths dyed green with cactuar juice. That they thought minimogs were sacred beings of Hyne, but that chocobos were the reincarnations of faithless men cursed by their wives. Notice a pattern here? All this stuff is interesting enough. But I’m on a mission. I don’t need interesting. I need useful. And none of this stuff is useful. It’s just takin’ him a while to get through the translations because they’re in super special High Centran, and he thinks this will entertain me.”

Yeah, that sounded like Nida.

“I don’t actually think he finds many people to talk to about this stuff,” Quistis said. “And, to be honest, he’s the only person left in Garden who knows any of it. The only other people who ever bothered with Ancient Centran history were….”

She trailed off. Well. Maybe it was better not to mention them. Zell hadn’t liked them very much. Quistis believed herself to be careful of the feelings of others, and in particular she tried to be careful when those people were like Zell and had feelings that ran hot and passionate and often led to their getting picked on by bigger, smarmier people who were quick to point out: "Hey! It’s Dincht! We’re the Disciplinary Committee and we hear he eats paper.”

Or something like that. Quistis had rarely paid attention to the DC – students too big for their cadet uniforms, who swaggered around under Cid’s nose, a tight band of friends in spite of the fact that none of them was at all friendly; somehow, mystifyingly, managing to get by with more genuine confidence in their little fingers than Quistis had in her whole body. Rarely paid attention to them except to occasionally give them a dressing down alongside Xu. The only person in Garden who’d hated the Disciplinary Committee more than Zell had been Xu. Though Zell probably had better reason to hate them.

“Who else knows this stuff?” Zell demanded. “Can we call them? Can we call anybody else? I’m bored enough as it is! My brain is bleedin’ outta my ears here.”

On the other hand, Seifer Almasy and his cronies would make Zell appreciate working with Nida a little bit more, and that could only be for the good.

“Our last experts were the Disciplinary Committee,” Quistis said. “Also this one kid in Trabia who’s dead now. But mostly the Disciplinary Committee.”

Which. That one kid in Trabia was, randomly, probably dead because of the Disciplinary Committee. Because Seifer Almasy, while appearing to be just a run of the mill asshole around campus for most of his early life, had, roughly seven months ago, mutated into a (brainwashed? Willing?) _murderous_ asshole, who’d happily complied with the sorceress' killstrike on Trabia Garden.

Zell wasn't a fan of the brainwashing theory. He held Seifer accountable for every death at Trabia Garden. It was easy to see this. It was written on Zell’s face. The moment she mentioned the Disciplinary Committee he took on a horrified expression.

“’Course,” he said grimly, crouching down and punching the ground with one hand, and with the other holding his vidphone so tightly that Quistis worried it was going to crack. “’Course our resident sociopath was into creepy, creepy ancient history.”

“I don’t think sociopathy and an interest in history are actually at all connected,” Quistis said mildly. “Do you want me to take your phone?”

Zell didn’t seem to hear her. “Do you think he was, like, into it because of Hyne and the sorceresses bein’ from Centra and stuff? Do you think he just had this weird obsession his whole life? I mean, he was always an asshole—”

“He was messed up,” Quistis said. “He was never adopted, you know. And just. He could be really awful if he didn’t like you.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Zell said. “He and Fujin and Raijin treated me like dirt!”

To punctuate this, he hit the dirt again. It sent up a big dust cloud, and they both fell to coughing.

“Sorry,” Zell said, immediately contrite. “Sorry, sorry.”

Quistis waved him off. She said, “You know, I never got why Fujin and Raijin followed him like they did. Or why Cid let him get away with so much.”

Cid had, in his own weird way, adored Seifer Almasy. When other students fell to bullying new recruits just because they had silly hair and came from Balamb town, Cid gave them work duty in the garage. But to Seifer Almasy he’d given command of the DC, to “teach him responsibility.” When other students failed their field exams, they were gently recommended for positions in private security somewhere, or offered internships in Timber with people Cid knew. But Seifer Almasy was given monitored detention and a talking to and reminded that Garden was his home, and allowed to try again, as needed. When other students carved up their sparring partners, Cid had them psychologically evaluated and put on probation. When Seifer Almasy did it, he got a brief lecture from Dr. K and a band-aid with a picture of a T-Rexaur on it.

Seifer had always cut an infamous figure in Garden. Mostly it was because of his own bad attitude. But it was also because he’d always existed on some unfair higher plane, where nothing could make him drop in Cid’s estimation and he rarely had to face the consequences of his actions.

“Fujin and Raijin were probably as messed up as he was,” Zell said, so viciously he almost didn’t sound like the nice Zell she knew. “And Cid? Screw Cid. You know he’s hidin' stuff from us on this, right?”

“Something more than the fact that we’re probably going to be stealing a Crystal Pillar from Esthar?” Quistis said. Because Cid had come clean about that.

“I—I dunno,” Zell said. “He just seems…off. I can feel it in my gut. That’s why me and Squall are stealin' his water.”

Quistis blinked at him. ‘Gut’ was not a very good reason to mistrust a client. Particularly when the client was Cid. All their gut feelings were muddled when it came to Cid. And that was a little childish. The water thing. Sure, she was a Blue Mage, and could hold off all day out here with very little water. But Zell and Squall _did_ have water of their own. She’d assumed they’d been draining Cid’s stores because they were genuinely thirsty, not because they were acting like three-year-olds.

Possibly Squall wasn’t. Possibly it was just Zell. Squall was actually very mature for his age.

At this point Squall came over. He’d gone back to the orphanage to rendezvous with their contact from Esthar, the one who would be analyzing the stair shard and comparing it to the Crystal Pillar. Now he showed up with more of Cid’s canteens in tow and offered some to each of them.

“I know we have our own,” Squall said, shrugging. “But we’re using his stuff. Since I think he’s hiding something.”

Well. Scratch that last bit about maturity.

“That’s what I think!” Zell said. “Something just feels off, you know?”

“He had a lot of books on Ancient Centrans in his house,” said Squall. “I think he tried to clean them up before I got there. But he just put them in his bedroom. Which smelled like blood. You know. Metallic.”

Wow, creepy. The blood thing. And also the fact that Squall had been poking around Cid’s bedroom. Zell and Quistis stared at him.

“He didn’t say I couldn’t check out every room in the house,” Squall said, like this wasn’t strange. Then, after a minute in which it seemed like he was deliberating something, he added, “I called Xu while I was up there. She said Rinoa was on a mission.”

“Rinoa? Rinoa’s not even a SeeD,” said Zell.

“I know,” Squall said slowly. “That’s why it seemed weird. Xu said she’d told her she sensed magic use in Deling City, which violates the ceasefire. So she sent her out with Irvine and Selphie to pinpoint it. But I just… I worry that Rinoa’s powers…. They scare her. So she doesn’t tell me these things right away. She didn’t tell me about this, I mean. When she sensed the magic. Even though I was right there with her.”

Quistis thought maybe Squall was trying to share some of his romantic woes with them, some moment in which he and Rinoa had not quite connected properly. She tried to express the appropriate amount of friendly sympathy. She said, “I’m sorry that happened to you, Squall.”

Squall blinked at her. “It didn’t happen to me. It happened to Rinoa. It didn’t affect me much at all,” he said. Then he clarified: “I’m telling you this because it’s why I was looking through Cid’s house. I wanted to find Edea’s contact information. If anyone can talk to Rinoa about being a sorceress, it’s Edea.”

“That’s a lot less skeevy than you just peeking into Cid’s bedroom to sniff out blood,” Zell told him.

Squall rolled his eyes. “It’s going to be night soon,” he told them. “Let’s head back. I’ve set up cameras around the crater to record the closing sinkhole. They’ll send the feed straight to Garden. Let’s just get some rest tonight in case our Esthar contact gets back to us and we have to head down into this thing tomorrow.”

That seemed sensible. And Quistis and Zell were bored out of their minds at this point, so they welcomed it. They packed up their equipment. Quistis prepared herself to scale the side of the crater, but Squall said, “Oh, and there are stairs. Cid sucks,” so thankfully, that wasn't something she had to endure twice. They sped back to the orphanage, set up camp again, started to analyze the day’s results, ate from their stores (Quistis refused to let the boys steal Cid’s food as well as his water), and – to cap off the most uneventful mission of all time – went to bed.

Quistis fell asleep first, she thought. Zell’s mind was always buzzing and it took a while for him to get to sleep. And Squall seemed like the type to lay awake and think about things a lot. So she was pretty sure her eyes were the first to close.

They were also the first to open. 

Her fellow SeeDs were screaming. They were fast asleep. Knocked out completely. Definitely not with her in the waking world. But -- screaming. Just screaming and screaming and screaming.


	9. Chapter 9

“They’re going to tell you your sister is dead,” Renata told Raijin. “Don’t believe them. And they’re going to want you back in interrogation as soon as they know you’re back in here—“ here she tapped the side of his head. His mind. “Permanently.”

Raijin couldn’t suppress a shudder. It ripped through his body, made his ribs hurt more.

It wasn’t the torture. SeeD cadets learned to withstand torture. No, it was the sense of camaraderie from his torturer. It was the false friendliness. Raijin had friends, and they weren't the best friends in the world by any means. They sometimes kicked him. Or tried to conquer the world on behalf of Galbadia and the sorceress Edea and fucked up his life in the process. But Raijin stayed by them because they were his friends, and friendship meant something to him.

And the perversion of friendship, the pats on the arm, the fake smiles from the man in red -- that meant something too, even if he didn’t know what it was, and only knew that it was painful.

Renata stood and crossed to the door, checking that no one was listening. She locked it. Then she came back, and thrust something at him. Raijin couldn’t really take it; his wrists were bound. So she held it up where he could see it. Some clear liquid in a vial.

“Here’s the stuff they used on you,” she said. “A Ripping spell. A sorceress’ brew. Takes you right out of your head, the way a real Ripper is supposed to. I could only get this one vial. If they drop in unexpected, and you don’t feel ready, I think I could trick Farica into thinking it’s water. Ask her to give it to you. Then they’ll think you’re not recovered. It’ll buy you some time. But don’t use it right away! Use it when we need it. See, I have this plan—”

Someone pounded on the door.

“Farica!” came a familiar voice. A confident, commanding voice.

The man in red.

“It's him,” said Renata, her face going tight with fear.

“Give it to me,” Raijin begged.

“No!” Renata said. “If I give it to you now, then—“

“ _Give it to me_.”

She had a heart. She gave it to him.

-

That same night, Selphie finally made it back into central Deling City. It took until nighttime because getting into the city undetected was hard in the current political climate. And so, when she arrived, she found the library doors closed. Opening hours were over. She considered breaking in to find Rinoa, but decided against it. Rinoa was probably back in her father’s house by now.

And actually Selphie relished the thought of breaking into Caraway’s place instead. Since Caraway had thrown her boyfriend in prison and all.

Selphie’s memory wasn’t the greatest. For obvious reasons. But the last time she’d met the general, she was fairly sure he hadn’t been as domineering, as hard-edged, as dangerous as he’d been in the club, or even earlier in the day with his daughter. He was a terrible person; that went without saying. One of the main forces behind Galbadian supremacy, the kind of guy who was good face-to-face, who loved his kid and maybe his friends and possibly his mother and dog, but who could orchestrate serious damage if you let him. He was no doubt on a secret Xu blacklist of SeeD’s most watched and least trusted.

But he _did_ love his daughter. That much all the group agreed on, even if they never admitted it to Rinoa’s face. He was always finding new ways to keep in touch, new excuses to contact Garden to see her. So why the extreme high-handedness? Why the open hostility? Why the nighttime raids, such a flashy and extreme way of handling a potential threat, sure to let the whole city know what he was up to? And wasn’t _that_ not his usual way of doing things. Caraway had been a spymaster, like Missy had said. Even now, much of his work was in the shadows. He hired assassins. He didn’t make a lot of noise when he shut down his political opponents. And he always covered his tracks so they couldn’t be traced back to him.

So why in Hyne’s patootie did he think it was acceptable to bust into a public place, kick Selphie’s boyfriend when he was down, and then send Irvine to prison? 

Not that Galbadian prisons were all that indomitable, or even anything new for their group. 

Still, it was enough for Selphie to hold a grudge. She considered breaking in through the sewers, but figured Caraway knew they knew about that, and anyway wouldn't let her do damage and damage was half the fun. So instead she disabled the security system over the back wall, cast status ailments on the guard dogs (poor things didn’t deserve it, but then it wasn’t _permanent_ , and they were bred to respond to phoenix downs well after twenty four hours had passed), disabled the inner lawn security system, disabled the house security system (she’d had some training in disabling things after the whole missiles fiasco; it had only seemed prudent not to rely on luck all the time), opened the back door while the clueless maid stepped down into the cellar, and then, as an afterthought, doubled back around and broke a window for the hell of it.

Selphie had a healthy revenge streak when it came to assaults on her nearest and dearest.

She went in. The back door opened into the kitchen. Huge, with gleaming appliances that looked classically old-fashioned but were in fact pretty modern to go by their settings. Also very pretty tiled floors and walls, and in the corner a dusty red dog bowl with Angelo’s name in curlicue print, and at the large island some plush red spinning stools. Selphie took a whirl. Fun. Rinoa must have had an awesome childhood in this kitchen. Everything was big and clean: the stove, the fridge, the cabinets. Selphie took a peep in each. Pies. Ice cream. Juicy pink ham with pineapple slices. Odd bubbly drinks in pink and red and pale orange bottles. Yum all around. She stole a pie and a bubbly drink and a slice of ham, then she ducked into the hall before the maid could come back.

The house was bigger on the inside than the outside, she thought. Had to be. Her parents’ house in Trabia was just a railroad-style cabin, tiny and cozy and homely in the extreme, with plain wood paneling and lots of bedraggled rugs. But nothing so humble as a rug desecrated Fury Caraway’s halls. He was a gleaming parquet and plush carpet man. His paneling was fancy and came with intricate trim. The whole place had a simultaneously cosmopolitan and antique air to it; Selphie thought she could recall Rinoa telling her it had been designed by some guy who’d betrayed Timber to the Galbadians ages ago, and how this made it a national landmark.

There was nothing about the house that really screamed ‘Rinoa’, though, come to think of it. It was too much. It seemed false. Rinoa was not false.

Sure, Rinoa loved pink, and wore what had to be seven coats of mascara. She packed a spare dress and party shoes for use everywhere she went. She had a handbag full of dog treats. She could hold her own in battle, but then most sorceresses could; it wasn’t a matter of training or discipline. And actually she resisted training and discipline all the time, as a matter of course. She listened to others because she respected them and because she thought it was important to. But Selphie had long-ago realized, while watching Rinoa shamelessly mock Squall for the umpteenth time, that Rinoa’s natural inclination was… Well. Trolly.

She didn’t like to let people get away with their bad attitudes. She wasn’t taken in by that kind of thing. This made sense. She was into doing her own thing, fighting back, resisting. She often did this within a group, yes; she was a team player to the end. But she also had a fiercely autonomous rebel spirit. It wasn't selfish or anything; she had, after all, been willing to seal herself away to save the world. But it was personal, independent, self-focused. Rinoa looked inward more often than people thought she did, and she reflected. With no small amount of humor, either, since she could tell you ten million heartbreaking stories about Fury Caraway’s yoke growing up, but Selphie suspected that Rinoa understood keenly the differences between herself, wealthy and grandiose, and the SeeDs, tough and mundane. So her stories were often watered down, made palatable, smaller and more relatable so that people wouldn’t be upset or confused by them.

Rinoa’s rebellious nature didn’t keep her from caring about people and wanting to understand them, even when those people didn’t care much about understanding her.

So. She probably hadn’t deserved her friends acting like jerks to her. Selphie felt like a jerk. If she’d had a fancy house with fancy windows, Rinoa would have been well within her rights to smash one or two, as a kind of general chaotic comeuppance.

Selphie went upstairs. From what Caraway had told them earlier, she could deduce that Rinoa’s room was probably in the East Wing. And Rinoa had left Angelo here this morning, since Deling City had weird rules about dogs. Angelo would be in Rinoa’s room somewhere, probably. Selphie held out a slice of ham.

“Aaaangelo,” she called. “Here girl!”

She heard a whine and anxious canine scratching coming from a pair of tall double doors further down the hall. Gotcha. The doors were locked, so Selphie picked the locks. Then she let herself in. 

Woah. _Woah_.

Rinoa’s room was easily half as big as a B-Garden lecture hall. And pink. Very pink. Two walls of books, a wall of closet doors covered in beautiful art, a wall with huge windows and a huge fireplace, a perfect princess canopy bed in the center, records galore, clothes galore, fancy pink toe shoes hanging from a pretty brass hatstand, tuffets here and there with pink ribbons, a big fancy vanity, a huge bathroom just off the main room, and Julia Heartilly on the wall above the fireplace, looking every inch the singing vamp she’d been long before she married Fury Caraway, coated in furs, with a veiled hat and red lipstick and her daughter’s dark eyes boring down into Selphie.

Selphie had, for a minute, the hilarious thought that Squall had probably gotten down and dirty in here, all surrounded by pink cushions and ribbons and his girlfriend’s mom staring down at him.

Well, it wasn’t like Squall didn’t seem a little bit kinky.

Rinoa wasn’t back yet. But she would be, because she wouldn’t leave Angelo. So Selphie locked the door again, gave Angelo the ham, and settled in to wait.

She hoped Irvy was doing alright.

He couldn’t be doing too badly. His father worked at the D-District. Selphie had only discovered this about two months ago, Irvine not being the most forthcoming soul in the world when it came to his background. She’d told him that maybe it would been relevant information at some point. Irvine said, “Nah, because he hardly ever took me to work or anything. I was always out and about, if you know what I mean.”

What he meant was pretty clearly: “I don’t want to talk about this, so I will make the vaguest of replies and let your mind go to the gutter. Then we can all pretend this isn’t about my unwillingness to discuss my past, but is just another mention of what a ladies’ man I am.”

Boys.

Selphie had never had a boyfriend this serious before; she’d had a few childish kisses with some Trabia boys, but Trabia boys were different. They were straightforward and boring and not half as handsome or strangely considerate as Irvine. Nor were they half as likely to hide things, leer at other people, or stock up on literally every kind of porn under the sun. So maybe it was a trade-off.

But still.

She could remember some things, about before. She could remember being impossibly close to him, terribly fond; simply assuming that Irvy was an annex of Selphie, the boy who would be at her side always. She couldn’t remember the awful pain of being taken away from him, but her parents said it had happened. They’d adopted her, and she’d been prone to fits of uncharacteristic sadness due to missing the orphanage, and then she’d gone on that camping trip and found that GF and come back good as new, so they’d let it lie. They hadn’t reminded her of what she’d lost, hadn’t explained to her about being adopted, about crying out for her friends.

They’d thought that was for the best.

She didn’t mind, so much. Her parents were good people. They were low-level T-Garden techs who could have made more of themselves if they’d hitched a ride back to their native Esthar, except that as far as they knew the city had disappeared, and also they’d had no idea what had become of Adel (they’d fled long before Laguna Loire arrived on the scene), and also it benefitted their daughter to have them working at Garden, because then they could watch over her, plus the low low Garden tuition became a flat zero if you worked for Garden. Which was good, because, the refugee settlements of Trabia being depressingly depressed places, a flat zero was about all they’d been able to afford.

They hadn’t told her much about Esthar, growing up. At first she’d thought she just couldn’t remember them telling her much, but then a quick check-in with them confirmed it; they just hadn’t said anything. They’d taught her how to work some basic kinds of Estharian tech, but that was it. People didn’t like to talk too much about what it had been like in Esthar under Adel.

No, instead her parents had taken her camping in the Vienne range. They’d gone ice skating and chocobo-hunting, catching the birds only to let them run free again through the forests. They’d gone to caverns in the mountains hung with beautiful icicles, where frozen lakes gleamed. They’d traveled up to the top of the volcano range, the so-called birthplace of Hyne. They’d gone to town, now and then, via sled or ski, to try cheesecake and other local delicacies; they’d taken her to council meetings with the Shumi and sat her on their knee as they bargained; they three had spent impossibly green summers fishing and swimming, heedless of how cold Trabia’s blue waters were even in July. They’d encouraged her to make friends, hosted student gatherings in their tiny cabin, made every birthday a resounding success.

Selphie’d had an exceptionally happy childhood after the orphanage.

Irvy, she was beginning to think, hadn’t, so much.

Which made sense. Everybody in Trabia who’d been to Galbadia said it was the exact opposite of home – smog and vice and extreme wealth thrown up next to extreme poverty (which sounded exciting, since in Trabia all they had was the poverty). Galbadia, people said, was twisted and horrible, as twisted and horrible as beautiful Esthar had become under Adel. 

But Selphie had found that, aside from the part where the Galbadians had bombed her home, she liked this twisted continent. She’d liked traveling from Timber to Deling City to quaint Winhill. She liked the different kinds of faces, the snatches of old and long-suppressed languages. It was her old T-Garden social science textbooks come to life, everywhere something new and diverse, all kinds of vibrant places, even if they were tinged by war and conquering and Galbadian invasion.

And she found that Irvy, once she’d rediscovered him, had all the hallmarks of this vibrant living on him. He wasn’t inherently intellectual– that was to say, not an exceptionally academic person or a bookworm at all, just someone who’d had to become smart to keep up with Garden life – but he knew more about different kinds of places and people than he’d let on, had danced the night away with some bright, spangly new person nearly every night of his adolescence, had stunning recall for tales of cowboys and dames and adventurers and spies and national personalities. He was a city creature, as cosmopolitan as Rinoa, even if she knew the elite libraries and theaters and he knew the backstreets and bars.

He was _interesting_ , all of a sudden. Not just little Selphie’s shadow. Now someone who’d lived, who’d seen gambling dens and dance halls, who had secrets he didn’t want to reveal. It was funny, because he thought it was his charm and ease that attracted her to him. But that wasn’t it at all. She liked him even when he was tightly-wound over something that reminded him of the unfair situation back home, when he reacted without thinking to news about Deling City politics, when he dropped his façade to blather on about something socio-cultural and important to him.

He was very far away from the boy she’d known in those moments. Very far away from her. But he became, suddenly, someone she wanted to learn about, to connect with. Someone who could offer her more than other people could; not just a comfortable, beloved old friend, though he was and would always be that. But also a whole new being, a complement to her, not simply a compatriot.

She really, really liked him.

It was _balls_ that other people didn’t see him the same way she did, and thought they could just chuck him in prisons or sell him out to the media. Selphie could have beaten them all up, except that even as a SeeD you had to get orders that liberally permitted that kind of thing, and anyway, it wasn’t like she could identify or hunt down everybody who gave Irvine a hard time.

But still. She was protective of the things she loved. Trabia. Irvine. Her friends. 

Angelo whined and shoved her nose in Selphie’s lap, begging for some pie. Selphie took a swig of her orange fizzy and scratched behind the dog’s ears.

“Yeah,” she said. “You’ve gotta stand by what’s yours, right, Angelo?”

But Angelo wasn’t just looking for pie. She was warning Selphie. The tap tap of multiple pairs of shoes came down the hall, and then there was a hand on Rinoa’s doorknob, and muffled cursing when it proved to be locked. Selphie stood noiselessly and gathered up her food and drink, then went into the bathroom and locked that door. Angelo followed her but did not go in. Through the keyhole, Selphie could see the dog lying down in front of the door, as if to bar the way for whoever was coming in.

It was Caraway and the maid. The maid moved in like she was scared to enter the room. Caraway moved in like he was looking for something. 

“I already clean here as requested, twice a week—“ the maid complained.

“Ordered,” Caraway said shortly. “You mean ordered. It is not a request. She is my daughter.”

“She’s put up magic books,” the maid said, accusatory, “On the shelves.”

“Where else would she put them? In the bathtub? And they’re not the really useful ones,” said Caraway. “Those she would have taken back to Garden with her.” He spat ‘Garden’ out like a curse. But then his face – or what Selphie could see of it – softened. “She read banned Timberi propaganda once, too. And when I took that away, she went straight to the source.”

He gave a low chuckle, but it sounded more forced than anything.

“I think the girl is becoming a leader,” Caraway said. “I think this should be evident to all.”

“She’s becoming _something_ ,” said the maid.

Caraway scowled.

“Now, we need—“ he began. Then he caught sight of something on the dresser. “Maybe this,” he said thoughtfully, picking it up. From her vantage point behind the keyhole, Selphie couldn’t make it out. He pocketed it. “And something significant as well,” he added cryptically. “Though it puzzles me more and more to guess what she cares about. Julia’s portrait. And the dog, of course—“ 

Here Angelo gave a whine, as if she knew they were talking about her. 

“—but both of those would be missed,” said Caraway. 

He strode to the closets and pulled the one of the doors. Things tumbled out. Clothes and tennis rackets, hockey sticks and shoes, hats and boxes upon boxes of papers and letters, scarves, more records, umbrellas and lace parasols, handbags and fans and fancy monogrammed suitcases.

“She doesn’t care about any of this,” Caraway said resignedly.

“That’s right,” came a cold voice from the doorway. “I don’t.”

Rinoa. She looked much the same as she had this morning, except she was carrying a red book and her scarf was now tied around her neck a little carelessly. Also, her sunglasses were pushed up on her head. It gave her the air of a pissed-off tourist, someone visiting foreign lands and expecting to find wonders, only to be surprised by moth-eaten bedsheets and cold fish for breakfast. Selphie knew that look; visitors to Trabia tended to look like that. 

“Get out,” Rinoa said shortly. “You could at least wait until I’m not in town to claim all my stuff as yours.”

The maid, taking note of her tone, squeaked a little. Caraway gave her an annoyed look. Then he held out his hands. “It is mine,” he said. “But what’s mine is yours.”

Then he walked out. His daughter looked after him in disgust, rolling her eyes as the maid tried to squeeze past without touching her. Rinoa locked the door after them, then did something very strange. She backed against the door, breathing hard, like that encounter with her father had taken a lot out of her. Angelo got up and went to her, whining. Rinoa didn't seem to notice. Then she slid down to the floor, looking for all the world more distressed than Selphie had ever seen her.

And Selphie had seen her at some very low points in their lives.

Selphie wrenched open the bathroom door, ran into the room, and said, “Rinoa! What’s wrong?” 

Of course, in her worry over her friend, she’d forgotten that Rinoa didn’t know she was there. Rinoa gave a small surprised scream to find her in the room. 

“Selphie?” she said. “Where’s Irvine?” Her voice was very low and urgent.

“Your dad sent him to prison,” Selphie said. She sat next to Rinoa on the floor, pulling a distressed Angelo into her lap to soothe the dog, and relayed the events of the evening. Rinoa, already looking dark, became more and more visibly angry as the story went on.

“I need Irvine most of all,” she complained, burying her head in her hands.

Okay. That made no sense. Not that Irvy wasn’t a good SeeD – he was. But the idea that there was some SeeD service Rinoa could get from him that she couldn’t from Selphie was weird. Irvy was great and Selphie adored him. But between them, she was higher ranked. He hadn’t even bothered to pass the SeeD test. There was nothing he knew that Selphie didn’t.

Only. There was. Irvy was a former G-Garden cadet. And, for all that their initial story to Caraway had been a lie, from what they’d seen of Missy and Tulip, G-Garden was involved in this somehow. So maybe--

“Did you find something?” Selphie said excitedly. “About the illegal GF?”

Rinoa stared at her. Rinoa staring at someone shouldn't have been an uncomfortable experience. Rinoa was very pretty – she had fair skin like the old Dolletians, dark hair like the noblest of the desert folk, dark Timber eyes – she looked like a doll, really. She had the kind of face you didn’t like to look away from, because it was attractive and comforting all at once. Lovely. Not _too_ lovely, not unnervingly lovely, not world-destroyingly lovely, like Edea or Ultimecia had been. Just nice.

But now there was something strange around her eyes. Like she could see things Selphie couldn’t and like those things made her furious.

“The GF,” Rinoa said tightly. “Yes. Well. I can’t tell you here. We have to go. I’ll tell you on the train. Or, well. No. I’ll tell you at Garden.”

“…at Garden?” Selphie asked uneasily. She reached out a hand to steady Rinoa, who was looking like she might start swaying a bit.

“Don’t touch me,” Rinoa snapped. “You can’t touch me right now.”

And the weird thing was, she didn’t say it in Principle, the standard language everybody from Esthar to Galbadia spoke, even if sometimes the accents shifted a bit across oceans and borders. She said it in her other language. Her special language, the one no one spoke, but that she could make you understand if she felt like it.

So it came out like: You _kan’t_ touch me right now.

Selphie, unpleasant experience with Ultimecia aside, didn’t mind the whole hard k thing. But right now it felt really creepy.

\- 

Squall was dreaming. 

Squall rarely dreamed. Or maybe he just didn’t remember his dreams. He thought it was a GF thing: that they snatched up dreams like they did memories, maybe. It didn’t much matter either way. The last time he’d dreamt, he’d been a moron. It had been Ellone’s fault. She’d wanted to change the past, and also possibly introduce to Squall to the riveting reality that his father was alive, successful, in Esthar, and didn’t have two brain cells to rub together. 

Thanks, Ellone. 

This had been his first thought, when he’d fallen asleep in Centra and opened his eyes to discover that he was someplace else completely, and also _someone_ else. Thanks, Ellone. Thanks so very much.

He didn’t hate Ellone. Far from it. One of the first things he’d remembered, once he’d realized he’d been forgetting things at all, was how much he’d loved Ellone. How much Ellone had loved him. But, love notwithstanding; she'd still thought it was fun to send him crashing through time and space to fill roles he'd never wanted to fill. She’d once made him live his dreams as Laguna Loire, leg-cramping sorceress-defeater and official Leonhart family sperm donor. And now she was doing it again, he thought. Because when his head hit the pillow, he became someone else.

Someone familiar.

He knew those hands. Long fingers, criss-crossed with scars from the earliest days of training. No, maybe not. These were more banged-up than he remembered. _Too_ scarred. But he thought he knew those muscled forearms, too. Even if now they were more ropey than muscled, skinnier than before. Still, he recognized that small, pale birthmark just underneath the knobbly bone on the right wrist. He’d seen it many times as he’d caught sight of that hand adjusting its grip on the blade.

That blade. He knew that blade.

It had been a gift from Cid. Like his own. But his own had been upgraded countless times during the war and the past seven months. While Hyperion remained, essentially, the same blade that had sliced open Squall’s forehead all those months ago.

Seifer.

He was _Seifer_.

The scars and the blade were only the first clues. Squall would have known Seifer anywhere even without all that. People thought Seifer and Squall were very different. They were not. They’d once had the same streak of powerful stubbornness, the same determinedly standoffish independence, the same dismissive attitude towards their fellow men. Seifer had always been one of the only constants in Squall's life. Seifer had always been there. Frequently mouthing off about the very things in life that annoyed Squall. Frequently mouthing off in ways that annoyed Squall. But still there. Loud, and bright, and familiar: an uncomfortable habit and a habitual comfort, because he’d never left, had simply gone with Squall from the orphanage to Cid’s care to proper classes to SeeD training. 

Until Seifer’s ‘death.’ It had jolted Squall, had made him feel queasy and horrible for the first time in his memory. It had been like losing a part of himself, some constant but oft-noticed body part, an unruly limb, or a blood vessel or something, the part of Squall that had always been there and had always kept him pumped, on his toes. Seifer’s death told Squall that he, too, could die. He himself could vanish, if it were possible for the world to remove someone as ever-present as Seifer. 

So that was _who_ Squall was right now. The lapdog knight. The orphanage gang’s own troublemaker. The one person missing in Squall’s life right now. Weird as that was to admit about Seifer.

The _how_ was, as established, probably Ellone.

But _when_ was he, exactly? He had no idea. Sometime in the past seven months, probably, going by the scars. And why was he here? He had even less idea. He’d spoken earlier with Ellone while calling into Esthar; she hadn’t mentioned that she’d be dropping by to torment his sleep again. Although at least now she was waiting for him to go to sleep naturally, instead of booting him into unannounced and unconsented-to mid-melding naptime.

Wherein, mind, Squall had no idea _where_ Seifer was. It looked completely unlike any place he’d ever been. And he’d been all over every square corner of the earth. He’d even been in cells before. That had been courtesy of Seifer, actually.

Just not in cells like this.

In a way, it reminded him of Ultimecia’s castle. Old. The bars were twisted works of art, like someone’s idea of a sick joke, iron bent into a kind of crowded cityscape, with small people scurrying to and fro, grimaces carved into their faces, and strange creatures, gargoyles pulling carriages. A beautiful vista, intricate and impenetrable.

The interior of the cell, too, was beautiful. No shackles and no electric torture for Seifer. He had gleaming metal floors, stone walls with more grimacing figures carved into them, a low table piled with books, a toilet behind a jade-green metallic screen rising from the floor like an exotic grove of jewels, and even a proper bed, a canopy with green hangings, so pristine and perfect that it reminded Squall of Rinoa’s princess canopy back in Deling City.

There was a symbol on the hangings that was also familiar. It looked a little like the Garden emblems. But it wasn’t that. It was off, somehow.

He didn't have time to examine it. Seifer wasn't looking in that direction. Instead, he was furiously swinging his gunblade, going through paces, as much a caged beast here as he’d been back at Balamb, when stone walls and iron bars hadn’t been his jailers, but rules and restrictions.

Why had someone jailed him? Or. No. That was dumb. There were a million reasons to jail Seifer. Why had someone jailed him and not told Squall about it?

Squall felt fury spike through him.

Seifer was – well. He didn’t know how to explain it. His. Theirs. Garden’s. Squall had assumed he’d find his way back to Garden eventually—oh, not by crawling back, like Zell seemed to think he would; not out of desperation, as Quisis had once suggested he might; not willingly, really, since Squall couldn’t imagine Seifer ever showing up anywhere with his tail between his legs. But still. Squall had been sure that Seifer would be back. Seifer was meant to be at Garden. He was a part of the fabric of the place, like the hot dogs and the detentions and the rank smell near the Training Center exit. He’d betrayed the place, yes. He was owed payback for that. But that was just it. It was Garden, above any other place, that owed him payback. It was Garden, more than trampled Galbadia and destroyed Esthar, that ought to have the power to deal with Seifer.

Garden had always been Seifer’s home, after all. Garden had made him. Seifer Almasy was Garden gone wrong, and therefore it was Garden’s business to set him right.

And Squall did mean to set him right. Not kill him. There was a reason Cid had always given Seifer chance after chance: Seifer had strength, and talent, and promise. Yes, he was reckless and arrogant and his personality was downright awful. But Squall knew better than anyone that you could be a real piece of shit and still put some good into the world. And Seifer owed it to the world to do just that, now. He owed it to Galbadia, to Esthar, to Rinoa.

And to his fellow Garden residents, the people he’d turned against.

The papers assumed that Squall plotted furious vengeance against Seifer every night. He didn't. He never had. He wasn't cruel. He didn’t want to kill Seifer. He didn’t think that would fix anything, and anyway, he didn’t know for sure that Seifer had been totally in control. He’d been nothing but wild-eyed, haunted, and crazy at the end; not at all himself. Squall was not inhuman; he understood that, while what Seifer had done was undeniably wrong, the truth was a complex thing,

So Squall wouldn’t kill him. Squall would throw a SeeD uniform on him; he had no problem with that; Irvine was a SeeD, so it wasn’t like passing the test mattered for anything nowadays. And then after that? Squall thought maybe Seifer might like to try his hand at cleaning up some Lunar Cry monsters, dealing with the Galbadians, speaking to the press in Rinoa’s defense, getting his penance plastered all over the papers, his picture on every newsstand, handling frantic calls from the Estharians, paying court to Xu in her worst moods.

Alright. Maybe Squall was a little cruel and inhumane.

It probably said something about him that the worst punishment he could come up with was exactly what life had tossed on _Squall_. Only in Squall's case it was supposed to be some kind of reward.

But either way he would have used Seifer. Squall wondered if maybe people didn’t know that. If this was why the people who were holding Seifer were keeping it from him and Garden. They thought he'd put Seifer in a cell. They clearly didn't want that for Seifer themselves. This wasn't the D-District, this wasn't some fetid hole where Galbadian political prisoners came to die, and this wasn't the blank white laboratory pens of Esthar. It wasn't even a Garden detention room. It was more like a luxury suite, and only the livid buzz of Seifer’s thoughts, the mental acknowledgement Seifer gave himself, angry and disappointed, confirming that he’d been captured, told Squall that this was not, in fact, just a really weird room with fancy decorative ironwork.

Since the world thought Squall Leonhart hated Seifer Almasy (as much as Seifer hated him? Squall really did not know; oddly enough, he suspected Seifer didn’t hate him and never really had), the world assumed that Squall would want to see him mistreated. So now that he wasn’t being mistreated, just brought to heel like a crated dog, no one thought to alert Squall. Possibly visions of horrifying headlines danced in people's heads: **Garden Commander Beheads Rival; Leonheartless Reveals Inner Savagery!**

Squall told himself that he didn't care very much about what the papers said. He wasn't Rinoa; he didn't have the kind of sweet temperament and sassy delivery that could defend itself should it be criticized for collecting gossip rags. And anyway that was pointless masochism. But still. The very thought that someone else might even contemplate such a headline made him gloomy.

As if to punctuate this, Seifer gave a growl and massacred the air with his blade.

It was a surprisingly good thrust for him. Seifer had never used his reach properly, preferring to rely on flashy chi attacks like a cheat, and privately Squall had seen it as a shame. Seifer had a powerful, long-limbed body; if he’d ever bothered to actually think for two seconds, instead of just jumping straight into flashy displays, he would have roundly bested Squall during training. As it was, he’d mostly seemed to fall into using his whole body every once in a while, out of sheer dumb luck or brainless instinct, and so he’d lost as often as he’d won.

Seifer had no one to beat him now. In short time he became bored. He set Hyperion down with care on the table, then retreated to the bed. He put his head in his hands, panting hard.

His mind was very carefully still, which was odd. It wasn’t that Seifer wasn’t thinking. The odd, furious, impulsive curse came to the forefront every now and then. But, for the most part, his thoughts were very very boring. He was thinking of his exercises. Then Quistis’s worst and most pointless lectures, recited rote from the textbook, the kind of teaching only Quistis could get away with without inciting mass disrespect from her students. Then the steps for escaping from a T-Rexaur in the training center, basic training manual II. He was, Squall realized, trying to calm himself. His thoughts were precise and almost meditative. Because beneath the surface he was furious, but someone had thrown him in a cell ( _turnabout's fair play_ , Squall thought), and rendered him powerless, and even Seifer Almasy, forever a furious little boy at heart, had enough sense to realize that anger was going to get him nowhere in this situation.

Then something odd happened. An image flashed in Seifer’s head. People. All arrayed in a strange formation, like minor officers in the army, assembled to mount an attack. But not the Galbadians. Not blue armor and guns. Not basic incompetence roped into order and set on Deling’s enemies.

No. It was a more ragtag bunch than that. Strange weapons. Grim faces. Odd costumes. Old-fashioned.

But familiar, somehow. Which was weird, because Squall was very sure he’d never seen this group before. Maybe the familiarity came from Seifer?

It had to. It did. The vision, or memory, whatever it was, launched Seifer down a completely different path. Heroic sagas. He knew every single one, from the most overlooked knights to the most notorious, which Squall supposed was unsurprising. He picked the knights out of this mental formation. Iseult Neve, Knight to Balamb sorceress Illyria, was a fine-boned woman in blue in the back. Died to see her sorceress safely away from the machinations of the Centrans. Her sworn enemy, Ignotus Romulus, Knight to Firion, was burnt alive by rebel tribes in Esthar. Daemon Carteret, Knight to Domitia, had fallen in battle against the Timberi.

On and on and on. Naming the knights in his fantasy army.

Was this another calming mechanism? People generally got put in cells to teach them regret, not to spur a renewed love of old children’s stories. But then Seifer was an eternal child. So jailing him was never going to have the desired effect. Whoever his jailers were, they clearly didn’t understand him very well. Regret was completely unlike Seifer. If Seifer had felt regret, it would have been disappointing. Seifer was, after all, as thoroughly stubborn as Squall was. He saw things through to the end; he felt little sorrow or guilt over his actions. He wasn't programmed that way. He never had been. And it didn’t help that Squall and Seifer both had been raised the Cid Kramer way: the moral relativist way. There was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ There was only your side, and somebody else’s. Only a side that paid you, and a side that didn’t.

Only. Only what Seifer had done was wrong. Somewhere along the way, Squall had come to a slow, thoughtful acceptance that it was so. Seifer had betrayed his Garden, fucked over his friends, attacked and attempted to harm Rinoa, who had only ever had faith in him. It was wrong. He’d picked the wrong side. The bad side. There _was_ a bad side; that was a thing that could exist, Cid’s moral relativism notwithstanding. And that bad side? Had been Seifer’s side. 

So why was Squall relieved to find that Seifer felt no regret over it? It didn’t make sense.

Only it did. Squall could understand why Seifer had gone bad. Sort of. Common sense said that Seifer needed to learn, as Squall had, that that there were limits to Cid Kramer’s moral relativism.

Only, for Squall, those limits were hazy things. He was still trying to define them. Rinoa helped him out as best she could. Her limits were mighty fortress walls; within, the Good: Timber, their friends, human liberty, compassion, dignity for all. Without the fortress walls? Caraway, Galbadian despotism, animal abuse: all that which Rinoa felt, deep in her heart of hearts, was truly Evil. But Squall wasn't up to constructing ethical fortresses. Even his love for Rinoa, the best thing in his life so far, was something that he understood might take him to very dark places.

The papers said she might turn into Ultimecia. Unlikely, Squall thought. But then he didn’t think about it much, because who cared if she did? She’d been more patient with him than he deserved, yet tough enough with him that he counted himself lucky. She’d stayed with him every step of the way even though she hadn’t had to; Ultimecia was SeeD’s business, not hers. She’d rescued him from Time Compression. And he simply liked her. She was brave, clever, pretty, funny, and kind.

There was very little he wouldn’t do for her. If she became Ultimecia, then he, like Seifer, would be Ultimecia’s knight. Wrong. Evil. But there you had it; Squall knew he was capable of that kind of thing.

Which made it hard to build up a very firm sense of right or wrong. To name his limits. It was almost with relief that he realized that he wasn’t alone in being slightly immoral. Seifer Almasy was twice as immoral as he was; he’d served Ultimecia, and felt no regret over it whatsover. He certainly did not demarcate good and bad; he saw no limits; he wasn't thinking on the evils he had wrought in any way.

He was thinking of the ancient Knights. That was all.

_Kazamai Sprite, Knight to Zigane. Killed by the Esthar city guard. Jana Ki, Knight to Eeya, hung by the Dolletians._

Oh. Death. He was thinking of the deaths of Knights.

Seifer, in characteristic Seifer fashion, had leapt ahead of Squall in an almost frustrating way, unaware that he’d even accomplished it. He wasn't naming Knights. He was naming his limits. He was naming the consequences of his actions, the results of doing evil. Maybe he didn’t regret doing wrong because what he’d done was wrong. But he had to have some kind of regret motivating him, or else he wouldn’t be punishing himself in this fashion.

It was a self-imposed punishment, this recitation. Because of course Knights, particularly Knights who’d served evil ends and made powerful enemies, didn't get happy endings. And someone had stuck Seifer in a cell to teach him just that. And Seifer, who'd always made a big production of never learning anything under Quistis Trepe, had to be internalizing the lesson.

_The brothers Telemachus and Oppius Hillfin, also executed by the Dolletians._

Did Seifer think these people would execute him? Had they executed him? Had Ellone sent Squall back to see the moment of his death?

The thought sent a jolt through Squall. They couldn't kill Seifer. No. Squall had a plan for Seifer. He had a way of making Seifer theirs again: Garden’s, the orphanage gang’s. Seifer had dues he owed them. No one was going to snatch him up before he paid those dues. No one could. The very idea was inconceivable. Fate couldn't allow it. Squall wouldn’t allow it.

Squall hoped, suddenly and with an intensity of feeling that he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge, that somehow he hadn’t allowed it. That somehow, in these past seven months, while he’d been bored out of his mind entertaining Galbadians in Timber, dealing with minor cadet peccadilloes, handling Xu, avoiding Laguna, he hadn’t overlooked something crucial. Seifer. Garden’s loose end. Squall, tired, overwhelmed, focused on so many bothersome new friends and a new girlfriend, had been in favor of sitting back and letting Fate bring Seifer back to them.

But, fuck, that was a stupid idea.

When did Fate ever deliver anything good? All the good things in Squall’s life (named: Rinoa, Ellone, Selphie, Zell, Quistis, Irvine) he’d had to work for, to struggle past his own defenses to even acknowledge. While the bad things – the infamy, the reporters, the heavy workload, the horrible crushing responsibility, the sense that now more than ever he had to watch what he said and did – all this had been tossed on him by Fate and Cid, without him really wanting or working for it at all. 

_Batibat Kerr, Knight to Adel_ , Seifer continued.

He seemed to be struggling to bring up that vision again, that memory of his curious army. A Knight army. Some force Seifer had constructed in his head, whimsical and weird, of all the failed dreams that had ever inspired him. But he didn’t get to it. The vision was gone. And all that was left in its place was Seifer’s angry spike of confusion.

_Was Kerr there?_

Why it was important to him that he include Kerr, Squall had no idea. Unless Seifer was a weird completionist when it came to collecting dead Knights (it seemed like him, actually; Squall vaguely recalled an obsessive neatness about his rival, a need to have everything and everything in its proper place, that had sometimes bordered on the psychotic), and wanted to count every single one in his gallery of Doomed Evildoers.

Kerr was certainly one you wanted to have. Squall had only the vaguest recollection of his history lessons on the woman. GFs and Instructor Trepe’s own bored distaste for the subject meant that he'd internalized only those facts necessary to take the test. But he did know that Kerr had been the agent of some of Adel’s worst cruelties, just as Seifer had been Ultimecia’s. Besides this, Kerr had been the most recent Knight before himself and Seifer. There were still people who remembered her. Probably. Maybe. If she hadn’t killed them.

_What happened to Kerr?_

Squall, of course, didn't know, and couldn’t have told Seifer if he had known. But he could see why it was relevant. If the consequences of his actions had finally come to Seifer’s doorstep, then it might be useful to know what the consequences had been for the other most infamous Knight in recent world history.

_People said she had weird powers. Wasn’t just a fighter. Was almost as destructive as a sorceress herself. She was responsible for the annihilation of the upper class, the deaths of the scientists who happened to dissent, and for the routing of the plainsmen_ , Seifer recited, not without disapproval. The disapproval was slightly hypocritical, given what Seifer himself was responsible for.

For his part, though, Squall put Seifer’s crimes aside for the moment and focused on Kerr. He vaguely recalled something about her committing tribal massacres. The Routing of the Plainsmen was probably that. Only more poetically put. Quistis had been in the habit of listing history without any poetry whatsoever, just names and dates and very large death tolls. Trust Seifer, dreamer that he was, to put a grandiose kind of spin on it.

_She had more finesse that her sorceress_ , Seifer continued. _Adel cared nothin’ for the law, ran Esthar on impulse. Kerr liked law. Law could do what she needed done. Make it impossible for enemies to escape the city. Keep ‘em from jobs, keep their kids from attending schools. She was Deling under a different name. Then she disappeared. Some people say Adel got rid of her._

‘Killed by his own sorceress’ didn’t seem a likely end for Seifer. Given that Squall and company had put an end to Seifer’s sorceress before she could rip apart Seifer’s mind any more than she already had. So Squall had to wonder why Seifer was dwelling on it.

_But what if she just….got away?_

Oh.

It made more sense now. Hope. Kerr represented foolish hope. Kerr, who’d brought death to doorsteps across the Estharian continent, meant something very different to Seifer. Go figure. Seifer was stupid like that. He’d lost the war, laid waste to two of the most powerful empires on the planet, attacked Garden, and was sitting in a cell. And yet he still thought of ways to escape his fate, to fight it.

Which, it suddenly occurred to Squall, was really the difference between the two of them. Fate had thrown a yoke on Squall, and Squall, who didn't like bending at the knee, had nonetheless ended up going along with it. While Seifer had stayed on the path of the reckless dreamer, the arrogant defier of Fate. What possible end could he expect, having done that?

As if to answer the question, there came a rattling from the bars and the sound of jangling keys. Seifer tensed, reached for his gunblade. Why his jailers had _given_ him his gunblade was beyond Squall. Sure, in the D-District they were incompetent enough to throw everybody’s weapons in a pile in the hall. But at least they took them away. Otherwise prisoner riots would have been easy to pull off.

Well. Easier.

_If they magic me again, then I can at least cut one open_ , Seifer thought furiously.

Oh. Magic. How? _Garden_ was fast becoming the center of the world’s magic. Xu had left some GFs with the Galbadians, but Squall knew she was itching to pull them away. She and Cid didn’t really like magic in anybody else’s hands; letting the Galbadians junction at all was just a matter of diplomacy. But did this mean that Seifer was with the Galbadians? Or were there GFs, and consequently magic users, that Garden didn’t know about? 

If there were, Squall needed to hunt them down. It wasn’t that they had GFs. It was that they were using those GFs to enact vigilante justice on his rival. And it turned out that Squall was downright territorial about that. And if they turned out to be Galbadians, then he was twice as territorial, because then they were doing it right under his nose, and were clearly scapegoating besides. Seifer hadn’t become anything Galbadia hadn’t given him the tools to create. If he’d been a monster (and he had been), then that monster had been a Galbadian pet run off its leash.

But the hand that poked through the bars of Seifer’s cozy little cage didn't seem Galbadian. Or. At least, not your standard Galbadian. It was too dark. Darker even than Kiros Seagill. And it was holding keys.

Which seemed like the last thing to offer a prisoner you wanted to see executed for reasons of scapegoating vigilante justice.

“Peace, Sir Knight,” said a woman’s voice. “Fujin sent me.”

And there lay the other big difference between Seifer and Squall. Squall was only just now learning how to have friends.

Seifer had always had them.

-

 

Rellia the card queen’s father painted cards. And no one else was allowed to; the family had a monopoly going. Which made no sense for a family that was no one, just old Nah-descended midlands trash, but there it was. The perks of having a sorceress in the family.

The other perk of having a sorceress in the family was that she understood secrecy. She kept quiet when asked; it was just what she would ask other people to do for her.

So when her guest told her that no, she would prefer not to alert Garden, Rellia did not.

Even though obviously she should have. It was the middle of the night. Her father and siblings and son were asleep. Only she was awake, startled out of sleep by an awful noise from the studio. It took her a minute to realize, sending out tendrils of sensing and scanning magic, that it was only her guest, disoriented, having obviously just awoken from a nightmare.

Rellia dithered for a little bit, tidying up her son’s things, checking in on him as he slept. She understood that these Garden types weren't often forthcoming with their feelings, and ought to be afforded some time to gather their thoughts. It took all kinds to make a world, even emotionally-stunted mercenary kinds, and Rellia would know, as she’d been all over the world. So she would let a few moments pass before going down to the studio; it was only polite. And, anyway, she preferred a stiff upper lip, preferred not to deal with too much crying and carrying on. It wasn’t like she had some Deling City princess in the house, with their twee ways of speaking and their spoiled, snotty attitudes and their cutesy upper-class spice names: Caraway, Calaminth, Ruta.

Awful.

Rellia’s family despised Galbadians and Deling City. Always had.

Good thing this one was the exact opposite of all that. Sensible. Reserved. Straight with you. Rellia fixed some cocoa for two, then went downstairs, full of warm feeling for her guest.

And found the studio a shambles, paint and paper everywhere, red splatters on the wall that it took her a half-second to realize were not blood, only Scarlet No. 47.

Her guest held a card aloft. There were no weapons or anything nearby, and Rellia’s magic didn’t tell her to be wary, so she wasn’t. It was a little bit of post-traumatic sociopathy, that was all. Rellia’s sister had been the same when she’d come back from her first Garden field mission.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Rellia said, a little awkwardly because she wasn’t by nature a terribly comforting person. But still. She tried to soothe. In fact, she projected soothing, calming magic. She even considered a sleep spell, but dropped that thought when she saw the card.

It was a new card. A figure in a red cowl. Everything hidden but the eyes. That was it. Nothing more. Not poorly painted, but there was nothing inherently scary about the image.

But the values. Those were scary. A on top. A on the right. A on the bottom. A on the left. A winning card in every way. Something you couldn’t defend against or convert to your side.

Rellia pried it out of Fujin’s hand. Fujin wasn't a card-maker, so she hadn’t thought to name it, to put the attribution in old Nah along the bottom edge, as was custom with first-edition Triple Triad cards.

Fujin just told her what it was.

“RIPPER,” Fujin said. “RIPPER.”


	10. Chapter 10

Miles and miles away, at some indeterminate point in the past, Squall still faced his own bad dream. 

Seifer.

He was Seifer's bad dream too, to be fair. They'd been each other's bad dreams for years, long before Ultimecia, not because they ever really differed on anything, not because they had any reason to fight or dislike each other. Simply because they were the same. They operated according to the same big question. 

_What if nobody wants me? What if I'm not worth anything to anybody?_

Theirs was a cast-off generation, unwanted until Garden took hold of them. Orphans went to Garden because Garden and Cid Kramer could make them useful, could give them a skill, could put a gun or knife or both in their hands. And as far as most of them knew, if that didn’t make you valuable, if that didn't make you worthwhile, if that didn't mean that people had to _listen_ to you, then nothing could or ever would.

Seifer knew that. 

Squall -- now Squall had retreated into aloofness. He'd always been a little childish, scared to find out if others thought he was worthless. So he’d become like a frightened animal, and curled up in the dark, personal cave of his own mind, and pretended people had nothing to offer him. But Seifer had never wanted a cave. He’d seen the cave offered, sometimes. There was something to Squall, some brief shuttering of the eyes in the moment before he dismissed you. Seifer suspected Rinoa had seen it, too. Squall’s humanity. A desperate, unconscious wish that someone would join him in his solitude. Seifer had always refused that invitation. He wasn't a lion; he'd never wanted to curl up away from people.

No isolation for him, no stupid lockup in his own mind. When people looked at him with judgment, he didn't run away from it. He thought: _They're looking at me. Good. As long as they're thinking about me, I can't be_ nothing _. So Let them look._

As long as they were looking, then they had to admit that you had some hold on them. If they looked away for even a second, then you were screwed. You’d be forgotten. 

You really would have no value then.

So where Squall was defensive, hiding away, Seifer was a constant arrogant offensive against the prying eyes of the world. Seifer stalked from moment to moment, taking in ideas and opinions with the rapidity and determination of any great ego searching for a boost. Desperate to force himself to everyone’s attention, determined to show off his knowledge, his worth. 

Seifer felt a distant flicker of that worth when a young woman came into his cell. When she said, “Hello, Sir Knight.”

Now, there was at this point no sensible reason to take pleasure in being addressed as a Knight. None. Seifer knew that, too. Knighthood had brought him utter failure, had revealed his worst qualities. But, inexplicably, knowing he was still a Knight in some circles did bring him pleasure. As a Knight he had, for a moment, commanded the eyes of every single human being in the world. Any regret he might feel blinked at him dully from behind his hungry arrogance. He pushed it away. He didn't want to face regret. 

“Fujin told me about you. She’s a friend of yours,” continued the woman, as though to show him credentials, to convince him that she deserved to be speaking to him.

Even trapped in a cell, Seifer took this as his due. And he said, “No,” almost as a reflex. _Friends_ were people you shared the spotlight with. And he had a long tradition, ingrained habit at this point, of not wanting to share the spotlight with anyone. 

“She’s part of my posse,” Seifer said.

This caused some confusion. The girl didn't understand posses, evidently; they had about as much meaning for her as friends did to Seifer. But she quickly brushed away her confusion in favor of the task at hand. In this, there was something of Rinoa in her (both Seifer and Squall thought this at the same time; they had both been subjected to Rinoa at her most forthright), and so she only said, “Fujin’s my friend now, anyway. I’m Renata. She said you would trust me if I showed you this—”

She produced a small circle, a kind of flat, red disc or dot that had meaning to Seifer, but not to Squall. It didn't make Seifer trust her, because he trusted few people. But it did make him take the circle and pocket it; also it told him she wasn’t lying, though he didn't bother to think on it more that that.

Renata said, “We have to get you out of here.”

Squall expected Seifer to feel relieved at this. The cell brought Seifer only mounting fury, after all. But then Seifer was used to some degree of fury, some low simmer of anger in the back of his mind, less muted than all his other emotions, but still normal, almost a boring personal tradition he couldn't break free of. And so he wasn't relieved at the thought that he might escape. He was irritated.

He had a purpose – his own purpose – for being in this place. Maybe not this cell, not really; that was an unintended consequence. Unintended consequences usually followed Seifer wherever he went. But he'd come here – to this particular _city_ – full of aim and daring, looking for something.

His mind didn't touch on what that something was, and so Squall wasn't to learn it. But the reveal that Seifer was here by his own design set Squall to thinking ten thousand confused thoughts. Seifer remained perfectly unaware of even one of them -- he had no idea Squall was inside his mind. 

“To where?” Seifer said. “Where are you taking me to?”

He needed to stay, he thought. 

“What?” Renata said, thrown off by the question. She, like Squall, had assumed that leaving the cell would be enough to make Seifer agree. “Back to where you belong, of course!”

Seifer scoffed.

Where was that? Garden? No. He didn't belong there; he didn't belong anywhere. 

_He thinks like that,_ Squall thought, _Because he's so arrogant. That's how arrogant people think. They force themselves away. And keeping themselves apart... it leaves them dissatisfied wherever they go._

_You can't be at home with other people if you're always on a ledge, scoffing down at them._

_He needs to come down from that ledge. Back to Garden._

But Garden hadn't given Seifer Almasy much beyond Fujin, Raijin, and a gunblade to show his worth. And he hadn't given Garden very much either. Seifer felt a kind of muted satisfaction in knowing it was still there, with its familiar rules and manuals and hot dogs and groupies. But he could never go back, not after what he’d done. 

Sure, Garden was the only place he’d ever lived, aside from the orphanage. But people at Garden didn't like him. And Cid with him was indulgent and chastising in turn, capricious; sometimes a pseudo-father, sometimes a pseudo-Commander, never really effectively both and therefore always throwing Seifer off-balance, making him uneasy, unsure whether he had any worth to Cid and Cid’s organization.

It had been a long time since Seifer had felt at home in Cid’s Garden. He'd only ever felt at home in his dreams.

He figured most people were only nighttime dreamers. They were stunted. They'd wake and shake off their dreams and continue along their way, unaffected, suspecting that ‘dream’ was just another word for a passing whim. But Seifer dreamed even during the day. Daytime dreamers -- him, Rinoa (Seifer felt a pang of fondness, which meant Squall felt alarmed) -- people like them thought any dream could come true. That made them too dangerous to belong anywhere. 

Now Renata came closer to him, questioningly. She said, “You have to understand: they’re going to place you in the—“

And then she said something in a strange language. It was familiar to both Squall and Seifer, but they couldn't understand it just then; they were neither of them fluent, although Seifer had a vague sense that he could translate it if he really put his mind to it and thought through the pronunciation. It was a word in the language their sorceresses had gifted them with, sometimes. The hard _k_ language. Ancient Centran.

Seifer stared at Renata. Was she a sorceress?

The thought filled him with two powerful sensations: horror and hunger.

-

“You can’t be serious,” Rellia told Fujin. “No. No, no, no, no, no.” 

“I left something down there,” Fujin said.

She was mostly over her trauma. Enough to speak sense. Or enough to suppress the trauma and pretend she was fine, anyway.

That business with the cards had been embarrassing. Here she was, one mug of cocoa later, trying to avoid looking at the battered studio and the creepy creepy card she’d handed Rellia. She was ashamed of herself. That display of terror wasn't worthy of a member of the DC. And it wasn't what she needed right now. She had barely-healed wounds, dark circles under her eyes, and a creeping instability dancing around the edges of her mind that she was only fighting off by the skin of her teeth. But she also had a job to do, and people to rescue.

“Your brother.”

“AMONG OTHERS,” Fujin said, deliberately lapsing into her old speech patterns. 

Most people found the way she spoke intimidating. And, when people were intimidated, they didn't attempt to dissuade you doing reckless and necessary things. Every member of the Disciplinary Committee knew this. That was why they spent so much time intimidating people. If they didn’t, they’d never get anything important done.

Unfortunately, Rellia the card queen wasn't easily intimidated.

“The black grounds are cursed,” she snapped.

“DON’T BELIEVE IT.”

“Well, they’re creepy anyway. And you’ll probably die. And Seifer Almasy? Not worth dying for. Leave him rotting in hell. He deserves it.”

“MAYBE,” Fujin admitted. "MAYBE NOT HIM." She inspected her rucksack, supplies courtesy of the Card Queen herself, clinically. Did she need more elixirs and phoenix downs? And weapons, for that matter? Probably. But then an infinite supply would likely not be enough.

“Oh, good,” said Rellia. “Wait. What? You’re not doing it for him?”

Fujin waved her off. Of course she was doing it for Seifer. And Raijin. Walking back into hell like this? She wouldn’t have done it for anyone else. She'd corrected Rellia because Rellia had intimated that Seifer was down there.

And of course at this point they had no way of knowing if Seifer was down there. Seifer might be long gone. That was the whole problem.

-

Quistis’ companions wouldn't stop screaming, and they wouldn't wake up, and the only change after fifteen minutes of shaking them and panicking seemed to be that sometimes they switched to groaning yelps of alarm and frightened roars, instead of pitched shouts of sheer terror.

She cast a Blue Magic-modified silence spell over both of them. This didn't really help . Except possibly it did soothe their vocal chords a little, since now they were screaming soundlessly. She assumed that helped. She didn't know. Garden wasn't like Esthar. How magic worked wasn't half as interesting to the SeeDs as just making sure you worked it better than the other guys did, so Quistis wasn't really sure how or why her Blue Magic functioned. Just that it did. 

She didn't want to leave her friends. But she didn’t really know what else to do. She’d called in to Garden and reached nothing but Xu irritatedly telling her that Irvine had been arrested (Was there something in the water tonight?), then passing her off to Nida to deal with because sorry Quistis, but your sleazy little friend got Caraway to lock him up in Galbadia; I’m not sure how your news could be any worse than that. 

Quistis let her keep that happy illusion. Xu didn’t really give her time to do otherwise before cutting her end of the call. And Nida was their Ancient Centran expert. If something about the crater and all that odd crystal and all that secret ancient script – if that was what was causing this? Then maybe Nida would know how to fix it.

But Nida seemed as baffled as she was.

“On the other hand,” he told her, “That’s fascinating.”

“Screaming,” Quistis said, trying to impress on him the severity of the moment. “Faces twisted in unholy terror, awful grimacing, I keep worrying Zell’s going to wet himself—“

“Squall doesn’t seem like the wet the bed type,” Nida put in. “Far too cool for that. Surprised to learn he even sleeps, really.”

Quistis blinked at the vidscreen.

“Of course he sleeps. He’s a person, Nida,” she said. “Not just the Commander.”

“Sure, but I really look up to him,” Nida said, like this somehow related to assuming Squall didn't perform ordinary human functions. “Our own Mister Murcielago, you know. Hangs up his weapon at the end of the day only to take it back up again when wrongs need righting. Maybe even hangs upside-down like a bat, lying in wait, though I guess Ms. Rinoa might mind it if he did that—“

What? Who? What was he even talking about?

Quistis rifled through her brain. Oh, Hyne. A comic book character out of the cheapest Timber presses. Nida was comparing Squall to a comic book character. Nida was an inoffensive soul, for the most part, who followed orders and had not a shred of ego to speak of. But there was a reason he was on tactical support, and wasn’t, you know. A real SeeD. A field mission SeeD.

“Nida,” she snapped. “Squall is as human and normal as you or me. He’s not some depressed and troubled gillionaire with a private arsenal of weapons and a weird obsession with a very specific animal and dead parents and, more importantly, right now—“

“No, I heard,” Nida said. “His dad’s totally alive. Good for him.”

Irritated, Quistis reflected that Nida was lucky he’d come to Garden. Anywhere else, and he would have been lined up against a wall and shot.

“Nida,” Quistis said, speaking very carefully to clear her head and cover her rising panic. “Listen to me. I am on a mission. My team has been momentarily incapacitated, and I worry that whatever’s happening to them could have long-term effects. We may or may not be able to _complete_ this mission if I don’t get them back, and – okay, granted – it’s a stupid mission, more a favor for Cid than anything else, but—”

“Oh, well there you go,” Nida said.

Quistis blinked at him again.

“Cid,” Nida told her. “He knows all about this stuff. Centran expert, Cid. I mean, Cid taught me the language.”

“Cid taught you how to read it?” Quistis said.

Okay. Okay, that was weird.

“Yep,” said Nida. “Bet he knows more than I do.”

What. The. Adelfucking. Fuck.

“He could decipher those crytograms or whatever?” said Quistis. “The ones we sent you? The ones we spent _all day_ photographing to get to you?”

“Made no sense that you guys were calling me in,” Nida continued cheerfully. “Figured he was just being nice by bringing me into the loop. Cid can be really great like that. I never had a dad, but it’s like, ‘eh.’ Once I came to Garden I had Cid, you know? Always there to give a kind word. Always—“

“Watch them,” Quistis snapped at him, setting up her phone so that he got a good view of Squall and Zell tossing and turning and soundlessly screaming. “Cid’s got some explaining to do.”

“What?” Nida said, thrown off (for once, Quistis was not the one off-balance in the conversation). “Oh, I—They look bad. And it’s nearly three in the morning!” 

“ _Watch them_ ,” Quistis snapped again. She figured that if something happened to either of them, Nida would at least be able to alert other Garden personnel. Hopefully. Maybe. A small side of her suspected he’d just take notes and then delightedly cross reference them with extremely esoteric texts on Ancient Centran cult poisonings or something. She really didn’t want to leave them with him like this. She wished desperately for Selphie and Rinoa and Irvine, but they were who knows where and Hyne only knew and in prison, respectively. Apparently.

So it fell to her to shake Cid down for the truth.

She left the orphanage full of angry determination. The moon hung high in the sky, oddly bright when seen from Centra, brighter than it was at night in Balamb. There were monsters on it, of course, so it was a pale factory of terror. But from here it just looked round and luminous and perfect. She almost regretted needing her mage light, that bright blue ball that interfered with the perfect night, to guide her down the rocky path, around the stretch of shore, and all the way to Cid’s cottage.

Something about the Centra moon seemed holy, full of special meaning. It brought her an odd kind of confidence. Confidence of any kind was a thing she didn't normally have. But here the sandy path, the crumbling columns with childish scribbles scratched into them, even the patterns of where the brushweed grew on the silvery shore, all seemed familiar to her. And cleansing in their familiarity. She’d grown up here, before Dollet. She’d been happy and whole here. It was easy to feel whole here. It was easy to feel not like Quistis Trepe, Garden poster girl and massive fake, spouting off about self-assurance she didn’t feel herself. Instead, she became just a child. A little girl. Sneaking out along the rocky shore, joining the others for a wild bonfire night, unafraid.

She rapped furiously on the door when she reached the cottage. The windows were dark, but she didn’t mind waking Cid up. Matron’s flower pot was still lolling sadly around on the ground. The brilliant red blossoms were bleached grey by the nighttime, and dying fast now that they’d been upended from their soil.

Cid didn't answer. That was fine. He had to get out of bed, after all. And she could use the time to knock louder. A furious staccato of knocks. They rapped out a pattern only she understood:

You!

Fat!

Old!

Liar!

Cid lying to her was very personal – probably far more personal and intense and painful than the others could know of or understand. She’d been an instructor under him, after all. Supposedly his equal (in practice, though, never that). The others had only been cadets, or, in Selphie and Irvine and Rinoa’s fortunate cases, not once exposed to his special brand of fatherly obfuscation.

No answer. She knocked louder. Still no answer. The secret pattern acquired several mental curses and some very creative epithets. Still no answer. She tested the knob. Locked. The windows were closed and also locked. She circled around to the back door. Also locked. All the windows were closed. The windowboxes with their grey moonlit flowers seemed to be taunting her. The cottage didn't have a chimney to creep down through or exposed sewer lines running into it, so there went the usefulness of that particular Garden seminar.

Breaking a window to get in was an idea hardly worth mentioning: it was so rude. On a real mission, it would have been fine. But this was Cid’s house. And Cid’s strange little mission.

She was paralyzed by indecision.

Surely she could…wait? Knock more? Cid was there, right?

But then her friends flashed in her mind. Squall, always so handsome and strong, now with his face twisted in ugly horror, shouting soundlessly. Zell, that unruly little brother, all his energy gone senseless, nothing but a pile of thrashing limbs. She wasn't like Rinoa and could _absolutely_ control her powers, thank you very much, but these mental images upset her so much that a burst of blue magic suddenly eviscerated the doorknob on the back door.

Well. Maybe Cid shouldn’t have locked it.

Quistis pushed her way inside. 

Cid wasn't home.

And his place was a mess.

Squall had been here earlier in the day, but he hadn’t mentioned the books scattered around the shelves, the vials and bottles upended in the kitchen area, the papers all over the floor. Had Cid been attacked? No, no. That made no sense. Who came in to attack someone, and then locked the door after they left?

More likely, Cid had ransacked his own house for something, and then gone. 

The bathroom was fairly neat, compared to the rest of the house, but Cid must have opened the medicine chest in the corner and rifled through it before leaving. There were some stoppered bottles of tough, thick glass filled with clear liquid in the tub, matching empty bottles in the kitchen, but aside from this she found only the accouterments of a hasty departure. A smear of shaving cream on the mirror, uncapped toothpaste, the toothbrush lolling sadly in the sink, house slippers abandoned haphazardly near the toilet.

And an odd slip of paper with Centran script jotted on it, and underneath that script some peculiar words in Cid’s loopy hand.

_Within our heart so cold and dark,_  
Where live the faithful lost,  
I do assemble one by one  
My most obedient host.  
No light can be unless we bring  
Forth shadows from below.  
And to reclaim ourselves as king  
A garden we will grow.  
We plant in sun so many seeds  
To lead the army good  
The dread domain will then reclaim  
Each one – the l

He’d circled the final line in red pen, and with so much force that she had difficulty making out any more words. Weird. Was Cid translating the Centran? Because he was a liar and hadn’t told them that he knew Ancient Centran? Or was he just a crappy poet who didn’t know how to finish his work? As well as a liar hadn’t told them that he knew Ancient Centran.

Quistis went into the bedroom. Cid’s poetry wasn't going to help her. She had to figure out where Cid had gone, then get him back, then get him to diagnose Squall and Zell. That was the plan. Only the bedroom was just as mystifying as the bathroom was. It did smell, as Squall had reported, faintly like blood. She found the source soon enough: a pile of bloody bedsheets tucked in a hamper behind the full-length mirror. Weird. Really weird. She ripped off one long strip of sheet, in case they needed to test it. Or. Well. Because she _wanted_ to test the blood, because this was too strange and too horrible and so completely not Cid, not at all. Cid was pudgy hands tucked around his stomach, boring cups of tea, and hot dogs cut into small child’s pieces because he said it aided with his indigestion. He wasn't secrets and bloody sheets. It made no sense.

On the night table, he’d left a half-eaten biscuit, a book atop some wrapping paper, and atop the book a list of GFs and the SeeDs best suited to junction them. For Xu. She could tell it was for Xu, because Cid had actually tried to put the list into some semblance of order, which was a thing he hardly ever did for anybody else. The list ended with a cheerful, _I’m sure you’ll find a way to snatch these away from the Galbadians!!! Think of the profit!_ and then three more hastily scrawled names with scattered notes on their possible locations within Galbadia.

Since she figured Xu might want to see it, and since she owed Xu one, she pocketed the list. Then she paused.

The book underneath was called _The Nature of the Knight_. There was a note next to it. Quistis recognized the handwriting on the note because she’d always had to give it a passing grade, in the interests of fairness and rewarding good work. Even though, at times, she'd really wanted to fail him on principle.

_Tell her I don’t want her fucking presents_.

Seifer Almasy. Communicating with Cid this whole time? Quistis flipped the book over and examined the shiny black wrapping paper with lavender ribbon. Black and lavender. The memory of a memory hit her – these colors had had significance to her once. She nudged her grumpy GFs and snatched the memory back from them.

Matron. Of course. Black frocks and lavender perfume. Black feathers and lavender hair ornaments. Her secret, personal space at the back of the orphanage, that the children would peek into but never dared intrude on, which smelled like black and purple in smell form, jasmine crossed with something powerful and masculine, and in a chipped black mug in the kitchen her pens with purple ink, and at every birthday and half-birthday and name day a small token for each child, left on the overstuffed lavender hall chair, wrapped in shiny black paper with lavender ribbon.

Matron had been in touch with Seifer. And Seifer with Cid.

Well, obviously, this was about as useful to her right now as Cid’s terrible poetry. But Quistis took the book anyway and stuck it in her bag. First of all, Matron hadn’t sent _her_ anything over the past seven months, so this was unfair. Second of all, Seifer had forfeited his orphanage inheritance. 

Even if he was Cid’s golden fuckup, always welcomed even after displaying the kind of arrogance that no one would have accepted from Quistis. He'd been given Squad Leader, and DC committee head, and if there was some kind of awful, awful alternate universe out there in which by some cruel divine potentate’s will he’d managed to pass his SeeD exam, Quistis had no doubt that Cid would have made him instructor right away, and stuck him next to her at every staff meeting.

A memory came to her unbidden. One of her GFs – Diablos, probably, since he had a laconic and frankly awful sense of humor – let it fly loose. Seifer after his second SeeD test. Under discipline. She’d thought it was a perfect moment, at the time. Seifer had cost her her instructorship. But finally, finally he’d been cost something in return. Good. 

Then they’d made her part of his disciplinary watch team. Typical Cid.

“I think it says something that every member of my Squad passed, didn’t they?” he’d said. “I wasn’t _wrong_ to make the calls I did. Cid as good as told me that—“ His voice had a mocking bite to it, sardonic and petty and mean. He’d wanted to take the credit for his teammates’ hard work. Squall’s hard work.

“And you didn’t pass,” she’d retorted. “Who cares what Cid tells you? Your failure tells you everything you need to know right there.”

Seifer had done exactly what she’d wanted him to. Gone white with rage, his hands fisted, his knuckles bleached. She and Xu could always dress him down effectively. She figured that was why Cid forced him on them, year after year. Cid himself didn’t want to discipline his pet disciplinarian. It would have made him seem mean, would have tarnished everything he liked to think about himself. Fatherly Cid.

So it fell to Quistis to do it. And she did it gladly, because it showed Seifer that there were people out there who wouldn’t be bullied by him.

But something strange had happened. Instead of snapping back, or making threatening proclamations to his lackeys, as was his wont, Seifer had grown quiet. After a minute, in a low voice, he’d said, “Cid was never gonna pass me anyway. He as good as told me. They needed somebody at fault—“

“You disobeyed orders,” Quistis had snapped.

“I was right to!” Seifer had said. “That’s how you knew what was goin’ on in the first place. And Cid’s not punishing me for that. He’s punishing me because somebody has to be punished – somebody always _has_ to be punished here—"

“Yes, and now finally you’re not the one picking who to punish. You’re the scapegoat. _Good_ ,” Quistis had told him, just to rub it in. 

“And, just so you know, Seifer?” she’d added. “Cid gave Squall your mission. The contact you set him up with.”

Rinoa.

Seifer had broken free after that, and Quistis had had to go after him, angry the whole time, but still level-headed enough not to do anything completely ridiculous like hold a gunblade to Vinzer Deling’s throat. That fell to Seifer, because Seifer was like that, and in the end he’d been defeated and received his just desserts, and Quistis had been made instructor again, because there were some injustices the world just had to set right.

Only now apparently Matron and Cid were keeping in touch with Seifer. Reaching out to him. Sending him presents.

Why not the rest of them? Or were they communicating with the rest, and just not with her? Why? Had she done something wrong? Had they expected more from her? Cid had never liked her, not really. He had a careful hand with Squall, an indulgent one with Seifer, and even _Zell_ he probably liked because only horrible people didn’t like Zell. But Quistis? What use was she to him?

In answer to this question, Cid’s alarm clock went off. This was a perplexing answer. It didn’t really get at the heart of her upset. Also, it was the middle of the night. She discovered why it was ringing soon enough, because it was tucked inside the night table drawer, next to several medications and a very strict treatment schedule sketched out in Dr. K’s tidy hand. Cid was supposed to be taking a pill right now. What had made him depart before doing that?

Musing, Quistis set the pills and schedule down, and took up the clock to turn it off.

And discovered she’d been away for nearly an hour. Crap. Crap crap crap crap crap. That was far too long to leave Squall and Zell with Nida’s rather clueless vidphone face. And she’d found nothing to help them, to boot. 

She gathered up her finds and rushed back to the orphanage as quickly as she could, hoping desperately that she’d find them both miraculously cured, awake and alert and fine. But they were still tossing and turning when she got back, faces still grimacing, mouths still opening and closing in silent screams.

Nida wasn't even looking at them. He was looking at something else. When she picked up the vidphone to berate him over it, he said, “Strangely, Squall seems more subdued, of the two. So initially I thought Zell was going through something worse.”

“How would you know?” Quistis said angrily. “I told you to watch them. You’re not doing that!”

“Well, yes, but it gets old after a while,” Nida said, blinking at her. “Anyway, as I was saying, initially I thought Zell’s dreams had to be worse. But Squall’s clenching his hands more, he’s bitten his bottom lip until it’s bled—“

Quistis checked this. He was right. Cursing, she cast a paralysis spell, terrified they’d hurt themselves more.

“—so I think it’s about equal. Squall just deals with it in a more dignified way, even in sleep. He’s really impressive, you know. Did Cid help you?”

The sudden change in topic unnerved her even more than it did when Cid was the one responsible, possibly because everything about this situation was terrible. She could handle missions. She could handle prisons, the terror of incoming missiles, monsters falling from the sky, the building she’d lived in for half her life suddenly turning into a spaceship.

She had never felt as awful as she did right now, on this night, with two boys she’d known since childhood depending on _her_. Sure, she’d always positioned herself dependable. It had seemed to her that when people wanted you and relied on you, you could be happy. You could be liked, and then maybe you could like yourself. But now there was no one to depend on _but_ her, and she didn’t like it one bit.

“Cid’s gone,” she said, miserable in such a way that it bled into her throat, came out with her words, making them savage.

Nida looked at her, confused. “Where would he go?” 

“How should I know? I didn’t even know he knew Ancient Centran! And now I have no idea who to go to for help!”

“Xu’s still conferencing with the Galbadians,” Nida said. “I’ve been translating as fast as I can, but there’s nothing here so far that even points to what’s happening to them. As far as I can tell, the very first inscriptions come out to ‘Within our heart so cold and dark, where live the faithful lost—‘“

“’I do assemble, one by one, my most obedient host’,” Quistis finished.

“You know it!” Nida said, delighted. “I thought I was the only one who—“

Quistis ignored him. “It was a translation from the Ancient Centran.”

Of course it was. Of course Cid had not only lied to them, but also gone and translated it first. 

“Wait, do _you_ know Ancient Centran?” Nida asked, sounding confused but excited.

Quistis gave him a withering look.

-

Squall wasn't to know Cid was a liar, wasn't to know Cid's mission had no purpose. He wasn't thinking about Cid at all. He was thinking of Edea. There was a reason she scared Seifer. And there was a reason Seifer remained desperate for her even through his fear.

Seifer’s sorceress had initially pretended to be Edea, pretended to be the only woman he’d ever called mother. 

A mother -- now that was a strange idea. Through stories and sagas, Seifer had learned that a true mother was nothing like Cid Kramer. She wasn't mercurial. She didn't give parental affection while taking with mercenary punishment; she never needed children to prove themselves to her.

She always, always believed that they had worth.

In fact if she really had been his mother, she would have made no impression on him, because not having to prove himself was a completely foreign concept. Most people thought he was worthless, a troublemaker, the eternal cadet: his life was one long campaign of ego and cruelty against them. So it was just as well that, for Ultimecia, the mother thing was an act, a kind of puppetry. The truth came through in her words. He understood her words.

Ultimecia-as-Edea had told him that she could drag him out of childhood. 

Childhood, to him, meant being valueless. Without power. Waiting for his next SeeD test, waiting for instructors to chastise him, waiting, always waiting, and without control. At the mercy of Cid and the Shumi guardians, at the mercy of people’s judgmental eyes, their small and petty digs. That Seifer was a dreamer – able to conjure up visions of something better, of a grander future – only made it worse. Squall had accepted his boredom and fear and hopelessness. But Seifer had fought against their condition every step of the way.

Until Edea reappeared. And was horrible. Powerful, cruel, monstrously egotistical – everything Seifer himself had ever been. He recognized that about her at once. This wasn't the mother he’d buried below layers of GF-conditioning, kind and lovely and good. This was an arrogant creature that seized his attention as soon as she appeared, and refused to let go.

Before him she dangled his dream. He'd felt a calm acceptance that he was dangling over some precipice, and she was going to drop him in. His whole life, he’d been afraid of being valueless. Well, here was value. The value of being a very good villain, of being infamous, so that no one could brush aside his name or call him an eternal cadet ever again.

So there he’d been, months ago in Timber. Hearing the hard _k_ underneath Edea’s speech, hearing the whispers of a language he’d thought was meant only for him, hearing the offer he wouldn't have turned down for anything. Ensorcelled. This initial spellbound moment was something Seifer would admit to himself, and this is what he was thinking of, and that was what Squall saw, and it accorded with Squall’s own assessment. Because Squall thought he was pitiful, and nothing was more pitiful than that moment of horror, when Edea’s eyes had coolly measured him and discovered exactly where to prod, exactly how to make him Ultimecia’s lapdog. 

But Seifer’d had more agency than he dared to think about. He’d had a hand in his own destruction, though he shoved the truth of this down in order to consider Renata’s offer, and so unwittingly kept Squall from being privy to it.

Here was what Squall didn't see:

As Seifer’s Knighthood had progressed, he’d stopped being really ensorcelled. She’d needed to use magic less and less. This was a truth he didn't come out with even to his posse. They'd seen him losing himself and assumed it was magic. Everyone thought it was magic. In the days after the war, the people of Fisherman’s Horizon had looked on him sadly and proclaimed him as pathetic and trampled as any of Adel’s laboratory subjects. The Dollet Tribune had run an article on how he’d likely lost his mind. Squall, hitting suddenly on the spot in the training center that had always been the DC’s special hunting grounds, had been struck by how Ultimecia must have mind-controlled Seifer to _some_ extent. Must have. Because the figure he’d cut at the end of the war, his clothing in disarray, his eyes haunted, his face shadowed and narrow and his wrists bony and brittle, was nothing like the young terror who’d once stalked B-Garden’s halls.

People assumed that over time the spell on him had intensified. Had worn him down. Ultimecia’s control had destroyed him. This made sense. 

It was also wrong. The spell had worn _off_. Ultimecia hadn’t needed to use her magic at all, by the end. This was the genius of her scheme. She'd recognized in Seifer something much more useful than an unthinking lackey. She had seen in him a marvelous addict.

The best Knights were addicts. High-functioning ones, to be sure. But still addicts. They cleaved to Hyne’s children because they had an overpowering need to assert themselves, a desire to be seen, to live, to be valued, to not be abandoned as worthless; they were hungry for acknowledgement, for glory. Seifer was of course no exception. The dreamer in him had always wanted not dull navy cadet uniforms and a condescending pat from Cid, but glorious pennants of scarlet and secret smiles full of promise and reward. He’d never really wanted to make A rank and retire at thirty to strategize for Galbadia, forgotten and fat. He’d instead ripped through old films and stories in search of aims that were more merciful than mercenary, that were beautiful and noble and that cost much, but suggested immortality. Not a life of fighting T-Rexaurs in the Training Center, but Ruby Dragons in the Vienne Range. Reality, Garden, his fellow cadets, all those rules that punished you for thinking for yourself – these things were dull and empty and couldn't sate his need, his desire to know he was worth something. And so he had a hole inside him that he’d stuffed full of dreams, desperately cramming in the flimsiest wishes and hopes, and all the while secretly afraid that this wouldn't be enough to make up for the boring, uninspiring life he was really living. 

Ultimecia made the dreams a reality. He saw crowds enraptured by their pairing, screaming adulation. He saw her true face, hidden and terrible and secret. He saw her great hall, the place beyond the edge of time itself. She had a great scrying bowl and with it she showed him a long-ago shore, where he’d built bonfires and held Matron’s hand and seen Cid look on him proudly. Ultimecia didn't just give him a bigger role. She also showed him magic of the highest kind. The magic of memories, of having a place in the world, of understanding his purpose and his life. That most valuable thing: an identity. That was what she gave him. 

He wasn't a discarded child anymore. He was a Knight. If he had to kill or torture to get there, then that --

That was a price worth paying.

But soon enough he saw her magic less and less. Her tasks for him continued, and became more convoluted and more daunting. Unleashing the Lunar Cry on Esthar, a city he’d always been fascinated with. Sending his posse out to find Ellone, using Fujin and Raijin with no hope of offering them the rewards she offered him. Tossing Rinoa – a friend, a fellow dreamer – into the arms of Adel. He saw less and less the hidden knowledge, the memories he’d lost, the adoring public, even the beautiful language that whispered around the edges of Edea’s mouth and crept out to beckon at him.

So all he had left was that horrible need to keep his role and his sense of self, to know he was seeing his path through to the end. To perfect his part and so imbue it with value and worth. This was the identity he had: the villain. It didn't matter that it was horrible. He was addicted to it.

Maybe this girl -- Renata -- was a sorceress. The thing he feared most.

But would a Knight, a villain, turn away?

No.

He stood. He strode to the corner. His coat hung on a rack of terrific beauty, a green glass thing, intricate and sturdy, but he seized it with such force that the thing over-balanced, and fell to the floor, and shattered.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Not back to where he’d come from, of course. Not Garden. Never again Garden. But out of the cell, at least.

\--

The early hours of the morning, March 20th.

Fujin and Rellia approached the black grounds. The earth here was level, stretching out for ages before it reached the hills blanketing the suburbs of Dollet. It was also, as expected, black.

There were no markers to show that this was where Catkin's army had fallen. That had always annoyed Rellia. She thought there ought to be _something_. Something other than all this devastating black. After all, Catkin had taken a good few Galbadians with her. That could only be for the best.

But then Dollet had had a strange, horrible relation to its Deling City overlords. Not quite a serf territory. Always chafing at the bit. But still too afraid to make any overt moves, to openly suggest that they didn't quite honor the noble shared history of conquest.

So no one had put up even a placard. There was just nothing.

“OPEN IT,” Fujin said.

“I’ve never done this like this,” Rellia told her.

When she’d first met Fujin, there had been a scrappy, tough, survivalist aspect to the girl. She’d seemed the kind of person who would fight tooth and nail to live. Now she was walking to her death. It wasn’t right.

Less right that apparently it fell to Rellia to send her there. Such was the lot of being a sorceress who did not want her secret blabbed to the world. People kept silent, and in return you did them favors. Horrible favors. Rellia decided to try one more time to dissuade Fujin.

“Look, if my sister found out that you were—“

Fujin whirled on her, fury written all over her skinny face. Her whole body was stretched tight and angry, her hands lifted as though she longed to give Rellia a good slap. She said, “DON’T CARE. DO IT.”

Feeling her heart sink, Rellia lifted her hands. She’d only ever done this once, long ago. She’d been very young and very stupid and a very slippery man had talked her into it. She’d since learned how to deal with slippery men, and passed the lesson onto all of her relatives, because she didn't like having to make decisions like this. She didn't like doing this at all.

But the world sometimes answered, when a sorceress needed it to. It helped her out. That was one of those peculiar quirks of being a sorceress.

Fujin’s comm went off. Fujin blinked, like she hadn’t even known she had a comm. Then she reached into the pocket of her battered Seifer Almasy coat. Cid Kramer’s voice greeted her. It was as affable as ever, but, as was Cid’s way, the words he offered up were terrible and confusing.

He said, loud enough for Rellia to hear, “You’ve responded! Good, good. I hope you don’t mind my keeping tabs. I slipped this into your pocket. I thought we might like to talk. This is bigger than we think, I’m afraid. Meet me at the shoreline. We’re going the Trabia route.”

“We?” Rellia said. “He was planning on coming with you? _Cid_?”

Fat, cowardly Cid?

Fujin seemed as perplexed as she was.


	11. Chapter 11

When Raijin woke just a few hours before, in the night, he was himself again. There was no one in the room: not the sorceress, not the other girl, and, blessedly, not the man in red. Raijin had never been so grateful for anything in his life.

He ached. He knew there were more parts of him broken than there had ever been before and that was saying something, because he’d been a consummate trainer as a cadet and he’d trained with Fujin and Seifer, neither of whom cared if they broke bones.

But he could take a lot of damage. He reminded himself of this. It was odd to have to remind himself, but his brain wasn't right. It felt like there was broken glass in it.

Painfully, he rolled onto his side. He moved his bottom leg until it dropped pathetically to the floor. The second leg followed. He heaved himself off the bed and let his body hit the cold marble underneath, ignoring the shock and pain, then lifted himself onto his elbows. His legs were entirely useless -- the knees and ankles were broken spots of pain -- so it fell to his arms to drag him to a corner where he collapsed, panting with exertion.

It made no sense to have left the bed in the first place. He could see that after a few minutes. But he couldn’t just give up. In the first place, he didn't want to return to the torture session. In the second, he was DC. The DC didn’t give up.

Raijin had a curious verbal tic. It made people think he was stupid. Maybe he was stupid, come to think of it. It had never occurred to him that he might be smart. But his speech patterns weren’t real evidence of his stupidity. At the end of nearly every sentence he would confer with his audience. ‘Ya know?’ _Did_ they know? Did they want to? And wouldn’t it be nice for them if, just once, they got the impression that someone cared if they knew, and cared about their opinion?

That was Raijin. Always checking in. Few people at Garden ever seemed to check in with anyone else. He’d followed his sister there – Garden had never been a special dream of his – and on arrival he’d been struck by the beauty of the place, and the bustle. All the rules and forms and psych evals. And, on top of that, the _loneliness_. Few people at Balamb Garden bothered to listen to anything beyond orders from above. Certainly they didn't bother to really listen to each other. Many connected in superficial ways: through clubs nobody had much interest in, through sharing the same books at the library, through making untouchable idols of their instructors, through training exercises and cavern tests. But then they promptly forgot key details about each other, or subsumed themselves in their own drive and ambition (you couldn't pass the SeeD test if you weren't wholly committed to passing; everyone knew that), and on second meeting it was as though you were a stranger.

GFs played a part. But it was more than that. Garden cadets were good at keeping themselves apart. Because people could die on the SeeD test, or on a mission: every year in the spring there was a memorial ceremony where the names were read out over the loudspeaker. A list of dead classmates as you fidgeted in the quad, as someone next to you whispered about the upcoming Garden festival. And this wasn’t the only way you could lose people at Garden. If someone didn't pass their test or Cid or the Shumi didn't like them, they’d eventually be cast out. So there was a curious sense pervading much of Garden that suggested that the more independent you were, the more focused on yourself and less on interpersonal nonsense, the luckier and stronger you naturally had to be.

But Raijin didn't need to prove himself strong. His strength had always been evident. At age nine, he'd already been five feet tall. Now, at nineteen, he was a cool seven. He was broad, too. Nobody had ever assumed he was weak. If anything, he was usually considered a bruiser, a thug, through no fault of his own. People looked up at him with a kind of anticipatory dread, seeing a looming, massive creature, skin and eyes oddly dark, teeth oddly white, the image of some long-ago Estharian plainsman who'd worshipped storms and raided shores far and wide. Powerful. Threatening. But he didn't _want_ to seem that way.

So he masked it with concern. And the concern wasn't totally insincere; Raijin really valued people. Seifer and Fujin were top of the list. But other people, too. Squall, not so great in the personality department (but then who was, at B-Garden?), but who tried with every fiber of his being at any task you set him to. Instructor Trepe, who seemed so unfairly lonely for someone so poised and talented and beautiful. Zell Dincht, who brought a much-needed vibrancy and friendliness to Garden, who was immune to the self-interest others carried around with them as closely as they did their weapons. Xu, cruel when she didn’t need to be and wasn’t trying to be, and yet still not half as cruel as she thought she was. Even weird Nida, who’d helped Raijin conjugate old Centran verbs when Fujin and Seifer had been leaping ahead, intuiting the language with uncommon brilliance, and far too absorbed in their own work to care that Raijin couldn't keep up.

Those two…they were. Well. In just the same way Raijin masked his power, they masked parts of themselves. Fujin barked out every word in terse command. It made people uneasy and scared. It was supposed to. Those were the speech patterns of the plains near Esthar, though of course nobody used them anymore because the plains had been razed to bits by Adel and her knight. Fujin and Raijin had learned how to talk like that in FH, taught by all the other exiles, and Fujin put it to good use keeping people at bay, making sure they didn’t think to cross her.

And Seifer? Seifer spoke like a thug. Seifer walked like a thug, and slicked back his hair like one, and sneered like one. But Seifer was hungry for everything. And if you looked at him – really looked – you could see it. Seifer wasn’t as tough or big as his coat made him out to be; it was just hard to make that out under the grandiose body language, the attitude. And he had a pale cast to him, an ashen light underneath his coloring, that few people really noted. Giggling young cadets would whisper that maybe he was golden all over; he always seemed to give the impression -- by his own design -- that health and strength were vibrating right out of him effortlessly. Really, though, he was the product of hours spent training and studying and poring over rulebooks, because he was starving for something Garden couldn't offer him. He covered this up with his bullying, his lazy hooligan speech. He had a good vocabulary when you caught him off guard (no one who read as much old-timey knight language as he did could fail to learn a few words), and an inner boyish need to be praised, but on the outside, he never showed it. He didn't think anything would ever be handed to him, not even if he’d asked politely or beautifully. So he talked like a brute, a gangster, someone who could simply take. Because he _would_ , and it would have been dishonorable to hide that.

In this, there was a kind of honesty to him. As there was with Fujin revealing her lost history, and Raijin revealing his affection for others. The DC were fake when it came to their speech and weird lists and gestures; they were teenage in the worst sense, coating themselves in imitation cool. But even with that. They were real where it counted. Even their masks were designed to show you something true. They wanted to be true to themselves in some strange way. 

And someone who was true to himself didn't just curl up and die in a corner, waiting for his torturers to return.

Now Raijin breathed in. Then out. His breath rattled in his large chest. That wasn't a good sign, but it wasn't the worst, either. His body had always been the most useful thing about him. Resilient. This was why it had taken an attack on his mind to break him. He’d never developed his mind in the same way. He saw the silliness of that now. Fujin and Seifer had always taken care of the plans (Fujin) and the decision-making (Seifer). And he’d always been the muscle. But now his muscle was worth nothing. Every part of him that might put that muscle to use was broken.

He would need to think like his friends to get out of this. So that he could rescue his friends. The girl – the kind one, not the sorceress – had told him that Fujin was out and safe. But safe was a thing Fujin hated being, especially if the rest of the Disciplinary Committee wasn't safe. So Raijin knew with certainty that she’d be back here, with all the force and common sense of a hurricane, to get him out. And to get Seifer out.

This hit Raijin worse than the red man’s torture had. Not that she would be back. But that Seifer was… Where was Seifer? He’d been… Raijin’s mind recoiled. He couldn’t think of it. He couldn’t. The pain he received, thinking Seifer was lost, was worse this time than it had been when Seifer had been under Ultimecia’s control. Because back then _some_ particle of Seifer had remained, some desperate glint in the too-bright eyes. 

But now, when he’d last seen Seifer’s eyes, they’d been very, very different.

Raijin choked past the thought. He had to be ready for when Fujin came. And he had to figure out what had become of Seifer. He steeled himself, began to plan, to really think. 

Then someone came in. 

She shrieked to find him gone from the bed. She searched the room in a frenzy. She found him huddled in the corner. Then, pity softening her face, she approached him carefully, kindly. Raijin was still reeling from the false kindness of the man in red and didn't quite want to trust her. But then he had no choice.

“My friend…?” he found himself saying, once he was able to summon up a voice. It came out like a croak. 

“The Knight. I…I saw him,” Renata whispered back. “In his cell. Months ago, before... Well. I tried to help. He didn't want me to; he said to get you out. So -- well. You know what happened after that. I’m sorry.”

Raijin hadn’t wanted to hear that. His weak mind shuddered at it. But then he was able to gather himself up somewhat, to put all those jagged shards of his brain in some kind of order, and he said, with more confidence than he felt, “We’ll get him back. Me and Fujin. She’ll know how to get him back.”

Renata didn't seem convinced by this argument. She only said, “Then we have to make sure you don’t break before then.”

“I…was thinking,” Raijin said, somewhat faint and unsure. “I was thinking that I could. I could plan this. I could be smart about it. Maybe.” Pain radiated from every corner of his body. He ignored it. “…I’m not smart. But maybe.”

Renata nodded. She looked relieved. She said. “They’re coming for you soon. And they want to know—“

“Sorceresses,” Raijin said. “They want to know about sorceresses. I could give them—“

“The new one,” Renata urged. “That’s the one they really care about.”

Rinoa. Raijin had only really met her once, during that summer Seifer had spent on the Galbadian continent. She’d had a quick way of jostling Seifer, making him snap back, retort, until they fell to laughing and showing off with each other. Raijin had never seen Seifer like that before. Partnered. He’d also never seen Seifer so happy. Or, for that matter, Squall Leonhart, later on. Or for that matter even Fujin, who’d been recovering from some heartbreak that summer, and whom Rinoa Heartilly had listened to patiently, treated like a person, refused to be put off by.

Rinoa was absolutely not the kind of person the DC generally liked. She was rich and spoiled, and she saw right through masks and showed you that she’d seen through them. Her own insight sometimes meant more to her than your defense. They should have hated this. They hadn’t. Rinoa had been selfish and prodding, to be sure. But she'd also left them each feeling, wonderfully, miraculously, like maybe the thing they were each trying so desperately to hide wasn’t so bad after all. Because after she saw through you, she just kind of went with it. Sure, she kept poking. That was her way, to be a little annoying, a little needling. But for the most part she had her dreams – Timber, defeating Galbadia, and so on. And so if you were determined to be a little foolish, a little brutish, she'd make fun of you for it, but she'd understand. Everyone had to chart a course for themselves, and if your course was strange, she wouldn't hold it against you.

Raijin had liked her. And it was really the DC’s fault, in a way, that she was a sorceress now. So something in Raijin rebelled at betraying her. It was one thing to betray Garden, to use Galbadia, to attack Esthar that had destroyed the plains, to screw over a bad system. The DC hated bad systems. With youthful cynicism, they’d spent hours between classes dissecting the evils of the world and dreaming of how to destroy it all, consumed by romantic anarchy. You owed nothing to a system, and it was the highest kind of nobility to despise a sick one.

But Rinoa was a person. Raijin had a hard time betraying people. People meant something. Even the ones who could do nothing for you but annoy you. They had worth.

“No,” Raijin told Renata tightly. “I—I won’t. Say anything. Not about her.”

But then what to say? Who to throw to the man in red while he waited for his rescue? Raijin didn’t want to throw anyone in the man’s sights. No one. He would've taken the hit himself, if it had been only his life on the line and not the whole DC’s.

But he needed to buy time, to plan his escape so that he could find them again and make sure they were safe, Fujin and Seifer both. So he would need to become complacent, accepting.

The man in red wanted a sorceress.

Raijin’s least favorite sorceress was Ultimecia, so he would have handed her over to the man in red if he could have. But he knew very little about her; had never seen her, as Seifer had. And it could be dangerous to share the knowledge of her. She was a kind of indiscernible evil that poisoned everything it touched. Something told him the man in red already had that in spades. He didn't need access to more of that.

Behind Renata, the door opened. Raijin’s mind recoiled at it. But he shoved the fear away. He recalled, with perfect clarity, a moment in which he’d been just as terrified as he was right now. Deling City. The sickest system of all. All around them people celebrating it, a grand parade. And then: the sense that his world had been upended, because Seifer had been at the center of it. _Seifer_. He and Fujin hadn’t known what to make of it. They’d stayed long enough to make sure he was alright. Then they’d returned to Garden, knowing they would be sanctioned or maybe expelled for attending the parade in the first place instead of coming right back as ordered, and they’d helped evacuate, because it was the least they could do for all those individual Garden people who meant so much to Raijin.

And then they’d abandoned the system. Inhuman, impersonal Garden meant nothing compared to human, brilliant, hungry Seifer. Nothing. Only of course they’d missed a huge hint, that day at the parade. Because Seifer hadn't been up there alone. There had been a false creature standing next to him. A mother who’d tossed her son into Ultimecia’s hands. 

Edea. The most untrue being Raijin could think of. The pang in his heart at the thought that he was giving someone up to the man in red was nothing compared to the mistrust and fear he felt when he thought of her, her black nails digging into Seifer’s arm, her cold eye on all the DC as she’d made her orders known, the way her perfect mouth had opened to hurl abuse at a boy she should have cherished.

Raijin said, “Do you know? She-- she's what you need. Kramer. The sorceress Edea.”

Renata stared at him worriedly. She turned to look over her shoulder at the man in red.

He only frowned. He said, “My friend, you’re awake. And _talking_. That's wonderful. But we’ve been over this. Edea, Edea. It's boring, all this talk of Edea. Edea will always be marked by Hyne, but she's lost her powers, you know.”

Raijin played dumb. He was good at dumb. He was dumb, a little. He said, “Has she?” with a kind of false wonder in his tone. And then he said, “But she can still take on the sorceress power, ya know? And…and she and Cid. They’re in charge of the SeeDs. No other sorceress ever had SeeDs.”

Because that was the kicker, wasn’t it? She hadn’t just been fighting the SeeDs. She’d been one of their founders, too. Raijin didn’t trust that. The official line was that she’d been a victim of Ultimecia’s manipulations. But she’d done just as much wrong as Seifer, and then gotten off, tucked herself into the Garden fold, back into that sick system she’d created, and left her son – Raijin’s friend – shadow-eyed and thin on a pier.

“You know,” Raijin said, entirely honest. “I think she set it up. I think she knew what was going to happen, and she stacked the deck, so that Ultimecia would fall, but it would still be alright for her. She could still go back to her and Cid’s army.”

The man in red crouched down. He pushed back his cowl. His eyes were flat and strangely pale, oddly lifeless against his dark skin. His hair was long and gleaming gold, so that he seemed like a Knight of old, like an illustration in one of Seifer’s books. He was very handsome, but there was a thuggish cruelty to the curl of his lip. It mocked Raijin. Reminded him of Seifer.

“The SeeDs – a kind of sunlight army,” he said, thoughtfully as though he were putting something together. “You know,” he continued. “I have a friend who’s rather interested in news of Edea, come to think of it. She hasn’t heard from her in an age.” He put a hand on Raijin’s cheek. Intimate.

Raijin bit down on his bile.

-

Squall was still in Seifer’s past, all through that whole night. But at first it wasn't so bad. He was beginning to think that Seifer had a future.

This made him oddly pleased. It touched some human part of him, some part Rinoa had prodded at until it had woken up and responded. He was a still rival to Seifer in the worst ways, still worried that Seifer was leaping ahead, still grateful that he’d come out right and won Rinoa while Seifer had gone wrong and lost – well. Everything. But he also understood Seifer, and wanted Seifer _back_. This possessiveness was stronger than his competitive pride, it turned out. No one could have been more surprised by this than Squall.

It was night, here in Seifer’s past. The place outside the windows was dark. Squall couldn't see where they were. Seifer’s prison was lit by weird green lights in odd corners, never quite illuminating what Squall wanted to see, forever leaving all but Renata’s tall form, two steps ahead, in shadow. She led Seifer out through back stairs, past empty rooms shrouded in darkness, into strange elevators where the grilles creaked ominously shut and the buttons were marked by weird symbols. It seemed to Squall that they were in a castle of eleven thousand rooms, a place that never ended.

Until they came out in an unfamiliar alley.

It was in a city; that much was clear. The buildings on either side of it were cloaked in darkness and they faded away quickly as Renata and Seifer passed them. But Squall caught sight of – because _Seifer_ caught sight of – more strange carvings. Horrible grimacing faces, odd little figures carrying hooks and knives and staves, scenes of battle, and fruits and animals he couldn’t identify. Also geometric tiled walls that made him dizzy, and doorways where black smoke coalesced, and the clanging sounds of metal everywhere. Everywhere. This place was a hive of activity; there were persons bustling by, dressed almost in the style of the Estharians, but no one spoke to him and they rarely spoke to each other; instead there were the crackles of fires being lit just out of sight, and the clash of weapons, and the buzz of saws. The entire place had a strange light, sickly and yellow and artificial.

Where were they?

 _Finally,_ Seifer thought. _I’m here._

Yes. But where?

“The trick is to get you out,” Renata was saying. She had, along the way, devised a plan. Seifer didn't resemble the people of this place. Not in dress. Not in features. So she had a somewhat weak grip on his gunblade, and he walked in front of her with his hands clasped behind him, as though she were a jailer prodding him along and he were a handcuffed foreign captive. But Squall thought that Seifer made a poor fake-prisoner. Seifer didn't do meek, subdued, or cowed very well -- even at his worst, he'd worn desperation with a degree of put-on grandeur that had been pitiful at the time, but that he'd seemed unable to shake free of. Last-ditch pride was just _him_. Anyone who looked at him now would have been hard-pressed to conclude that Renata had cowed him in any way. But they had darkness on their side, and in that darkness it seemed that no one looked too closely. They came around the edge of a building, its open door churning out black smoke, and met—

A wall? A solid, tiled wall, patterned with brilliant colors. Going far in every direction, and when Seifer craned his head to look, they could see that it went up, up, up, up, curving ever-so-slightly in a concave fashion, until it vanished into blackness.

As though the city were ensconced by it.

Seriously. Where _were_ they? Renata nudged Seifer gently to the right, down a set of steps, and then they were in a tunnel beneath the city, also tiled in every direction. There were what looked like advertisements set into the walls, strange pictures of people laughing just a little too cheerfully, of dark pools in tranquil caves that were just a little too perfect.

The writing on the ads wasn't anything Squall could read. This worried him. He thought he could remember what language that was, even if it wasn’t a language he could decipher. But when he reached for the memory it just wasn’t there.

Seifer could read it. That was the stunning thing. _See The Stalagmites of Sodor!_ and _Lukos Wrigby, The Gladiator of The Century, Faces Off Against Fifty Leowyrms! Match This Hynesday At Five!_ The ads came to Squall translated, filtered through Seifer’s brain. And soon enough Squall was deciphering them too, almost with borrowed knowledge, and it came as some shock when he saw smaller notices tacked up here and there on the tiled walls, in Principle, with proclamations like:

 **Traveling Without Your Identification Is Frowned Upon** and  
 **Deluxe Cars Forbidden To Skins**.

People hurried past them, and soon enough they were lost in a crowd. And then in the distance Squall heard – because Seifer heard – the shrieks of more metal and the click-clack of rails.

A subway. They were in a subway. But—but that was ludicrous. No city had an underground subway. Not anymore, anyway. Squall tried to recall when he’d learned about one that did (he was sure he'd learned about it), but the memory wouldn’t come to him. Was it Deling City? Had they had one, but shut it down, because of totalitarian activity? No, that wasn’t it. Timber, maybe. City of trains. Or maybe—

 _Now we’re underneath the Underworld_ , Seifer thought, with a kind of satisfied wonder.

What?

“We have to take the regular cars,” Renata was saying, now that they were in that special kind of crowd: a group of people so frenetic and so large that there was no chance of anyone paying them the slightest attention. She’d dropped the jailer act and now held the gunblade limply, like she didn’t know what to do with it and didn’t want to accidentally slice anybody open. Seifer took the dilemma out of her hands. He took his blade back. Renata blinked at him, but quickly recovered. She said, “Look, we can only get one of you out at a time.”

“Raijin first,” Seifer said, without even thinking about it.

“What? No! Not him. _You_. Do you understand what they’re going to do to you? They’re taking you to the—”

Again the word. The sorceress word. The one they didn’t know. Though Seifer had abandoned the thought of Renata being a sorceress some time ago. He simply seemed to know in his bones that she wasn't. Squall knew it too. There was a spark of strength to Rinoa, and a heavy undercurrent of power that had blanketed Ultimecia, that any Knight felt right away. But Renata didn't have that strength or power. She was like normal people were: blank, nothing reaching out to tug at the mind.

She repeated the word, urgently this time. She brought a slim dark hand up and hit Seifer’s chest with it, as if to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation. He simply looked at her, unimpressed, because if all it took to knock sense into Seifer was a hit to the chest, then Squall would have accomplished it years ago.

Seifer said, “Repeat that.”

“The Gallery,” said Renata.

Or, rather, she didn't say the Gallery. She said the same word – the sorceress word. And something clicked in Seifer’s brain, the way it had with the advertisements. And so then suddenly he knew what she was saying. And Squall knew, as well, before Seifer repeated the word to her back in Principle, to be sure.

“I guess that is the translation,” she said, furrowing her brow. “But it doesn’t matter.”

Only Seifer thought it did. He was searching his mind now for why, there on the crowded train platform, as at home in this odd place as he ought to have been (but never quite was) at Garden. And Renata had to grab his sleeve and pull him onto the train when it came, so bothered was he by the fact that he couldn’t access the memory. _Gallery. The Gallery. Dammit, I saw it! I know I did._

Squall was just as confused. Did he mean his Gallery of Failed Knights?

The strange thing was, it was almost like by thinking this he restored the memory to Seifer. Seifer, who didn't even know Squall was there hit on the thought right away, plucked it from Squall’s mental grasp, held it alight, and examined it, even as Renata dragged him along and shoved him in a corner of the train.

“Are you listening?” she hissed.

The trains had black cars and putrid green ones. The black stayed closed. The green opened. Their insides had hard metal seats that were all taken and too many people piled in all around them, so that it was oppressively hot. With all the hauteur of an old Dolletian nobleman, Seifer shrugged out of his heavy coat. Renata took it confusedly, tricked into playing his steward. Seifer waved at her again, as though to suggest he might be open to hearing what she had to say.

But he had bigger things on his mind.

Seifer had been time compressed along with the rest of them. It hit Squall as something of a surprise, but then he berated himself for it. Of course Seifer had been time compressed. Ultimecia’s spell had had no real rhyme or reason to it. They still weren’t sure how many people had been affected when she’d compressed time. Most had been fine. They suffered some nausea in the moment Ultimecia had fucked the timeline, some sense that the universe had gone off its tilt. They'd seen faraway places, long-gone people, but nothing that could hurt them. Those who could had remained firm, strong, and kept to good memories, drawing strength from their past and their loved ones and pulling themselves back into their present. 

But then there had been others. A family in Dollet reported horrible visions, images of soldiers raiding houses, ash falling from the sky. The people of Winhill claimed ghosts had risen from the floorboards, ghosts with flowers where their eyes should be. In Fisherman’s Horizon, more than one person had looked outside their window and seen not the ocean, but the vast Estharian plains. A few had decided to go riding on them, as if in a daze, and thankfully most of the fishermen were also good swimmers or else after Time Compression there would have been a whole lot of sudden drownings to account for. Trabia Garden had seemed healthy and whole again, its modest towers shining on its once-again green fields, for a single instant, for all the survivors, with the dead peeking from the windows, opening their mouths to greet their friends and letting out only black smoke instead. And no Trabian could say whether it had been Time Compression at all, or just a mass hallucination.

If all those people had been affected, then it stood to reason that Seifer, who’d been so intimately connected to the one responsible, should have suffered too.

Squall had ultimately fallen out of Ultimecia’s castle and into his own past. Seifer had made the opposite journey. Time Compression had dragged him forwards, into the castle, running parallel to the rest of the orphanage gang. While they’d defeated sorceresses and monsters and gazed with horrified wonder at the sheer empty creepiness of the place, Seifer had found the castle a different experience entirely.

In one room there were scores of people chattering. Their faces were small bits of blurred colors and shapes, like sudden static on an old television. But there they were all the same, glitches in old-fashioned dress, beckoning to Seifer. _Sieur, Sieur_. He'd passed in through double-doors at one end, then out through the double-doors at the other, only to come back through the same room, in a different time, now all the windows fitted with bars and hung with green army fabric, rows of plastic-topped tables manned by rows of dark, desperate looking men, all working under the watchful eye of a guard, who beckoned Seifer forward. There was a woman on his arm, pale and tall with bright hair – sometimes gold, sometimes red. _Sir, Sir_. Out again through the double doors.

And so on, an infinite loop, always something new each time, until he thought he would go crazy with it. And just when he’d thought that, there he was in a new room, a new grand hall. And made to repeat the process over. At times, it was Edea who was with him, the edges of her form blurry and indistinct, sobbing for some reason. At others it was Cid, first smiling indulgently down at him, then morphing into a taller, more threatening form, calling him worthless, calling him dishonorable, a coward – the GF Odin, who he’d struck down.

Time Compression made no sense. Dreams and reason and self were supposed to fall away. You were supposed to become unaware of yourself, of where you began and the world ended. That was what had happened to Squall. That was why he’d needed Rinoa.

Not so for Seifer, who stalked through life full of unfilled cravings, famished for something no one could figure out. Time Compression only crystallized that ache inside him, that yearning. It had grown stronger and stronger and harder to resist all while he’d been serving Ultimecia. Then she'd forced all the world into a single instant. And in that instant Seifer was hungrier than ever before, with less chance of ever seeing himself sated. Simply walking in an endless loop, desperate, ravenous and empty.

And so at one point he stopped. He ignored the forms all around him; the strange woman patting his arm; a dark girl just ahead; Cid Kramer; his posse, all comingled with the faces of dead soldiers he recalled from his SeeD tests. He brought up a hand, and could see the odd transparency to his fingers, his skin gone paper white and stretched over each bone segment. He had the odd sense that he'd overdosed on his sorceress’s magic, and now all his body was in the process of dying, beginning to match his ragged coat, falling away, and in time he’d become only the thing that he was inside, the unfulfilled thing, himself without a mask, as his outer form left him and rotted away.

Seifer saw a glimpse of himself for the first time. Cruel and careless. Someone who’d gone after his desires to the fullest, devoured and devoured, and come out with—what?

Nothing. A loss of control. He’d ceded himself to Ultimecia, wholly and completely, convinced he was in charge the whole time. And in fact he’d only lost those parts of himself that were his protection against the world: his sense, his reason, his hope of heroism and worth. He’d lost who he wanted to be. And the really horrible thing was: it wasn't his sorceress who had turned him inside out like this. She’d done something worse. She’d convinced him to turn _himself_ inside out.

She appeared before him. It was her; he knew it was, even as the edges of her form shifted, as she grew white wings like Rinoa, as she shrunk and seemed like any Deling City girl in fancy clothes, as her eyes went as perfectly warmly gold as Matron’s. She said, staring at him, “So you’re going to be my Knight?”

“No,” he’d said. “No, no, no, no. no.”

“It’s already happened,” she reflected, her form still indistinct. She became Rinoa, for a second, in Adel’s arms. It hit some chord inside him, and then he felt like the chord was ripped out, and like his body was fading away even faster. “It’s already happened, and it’s happening, and it will continue to happen. Every moment in the timeline is the same. That means it can’t be changed. It happens now. It will happen over and over and over again. You will always be this, in the end.”

She gestured at him. He looked down. His feet, legs, hips, chest – formless. Not strong, not heroic, not likely to go down in history. Just nothing. He turned and ran. Around him, the rooms looped and looped. They changed slightly. But in the end they were all the same, and each one more senseless and worthless than the last.

Like him.

Squall had had Rinoa to pull him out of Time Compression. Seifer had no one, or at least at first he didn’t. When help came, it was as horrible and confusing as anything else here – simply a hand, drawing him not out of the room, but _down_.

Strange. He’d never thought to head down. For one thing, he hadn't been thinking according to the absurd rules of Time Compression. So he’d assumed that the floor would be in the way. 

“Who are you?” he demanded of his rescuer. 

“A guardian,” they said. 

They dropped him in the Gallery. He didn’t know how he knew it was called that; maybe his rescuer had whispered it to him. But it was a Gallery. An enormous hall, with metal walls like the lecture halls at Garden, only here there were no desks or computer consoles or a bored teenage instructors, but Knights. Only Knights. 

All the Knights. Many Seifer knew, because Seifer knew more about knights than maybe any other person in the world. And many he didn’t know. They were still as statues, except that when he touched them their eyes fluttered, they cocked their heads, they responded to him. He was fast-fading at this point, but these long-dead figures were mockingly whole compared to him: in fact, some of them practically shone with vitality. He wandered among them for some time. Daemon Carteret was dark-skinned, not Dolletian-seeming at all – who knew? But it had to be him, for there was his famed scythe and he wore the colors of Domitia herself. 

Ignotus Romulus and Iseult Neve, enemies until they’d drawn their last breaths, sat facing each other. She wore the blue sari of old Balamb, and her legendary sword gleamed wickedly at Ignotus’s throat. He, for his part, had that red painted face, his trademark mourning band painted across his throat. 

Each one looked powerful, healthy, and alive. All alive. As though the world would never permit them to die. Never. They were too valuable. Even the ones Seifer didn’t know – men with mechanical steeds and wickedly sharp teeth, women with claws for fingernails and blood marring their soldiers’ tunics – imparted a sense of being useful, being worthy, being unafraid. 

This was the hall, and these the people, that had long haunted and fed Seifer’s hungriest dreams. 

“Failure isn’t an issue for them,” noted his rescuer. “They’re beyond that. They were successful Knights.” 

“It is for me,” Seifer admitted bitterly, speaking over a rage and despair that seemed to mount in his fast-disappearing throat. “I – I—“

“Lost control. Fucked up,” his rescuer said. They sounded like Cid. The same subtle recrimination, the same patronizing pity. “Come here. Look at this.”

And his rescuer led him to the back. The figures became more powerful, more inhuman, their clothing older and more curious. Until at last they found one spot, one corner, that was –

Empty. Just an empty chair, forlorn and abandoned. One imperfect, lone spot in the gallery of heroes.

“You've demolished the one who should have gone here,” Seifer’s self-appointed guardian told him. “You, uncaring and heedless, have made piecemeal out of this Knight. What’s a Knight worth, when he works only for evil? Now the creature that belonged here can never take his rightful place. He no longer exists.”

He? Who was he?

“Dishonorable wretch that _you_ have become—“ clarified the guardian.

“No!” Seifer cried. “I’m not! This is my place! I belong here. I know I do. With the Knights. Gimme a chance—“

“When has anyone ever given you a chance?” snapped his rescuer. “No one does. You aren’t worth it. Your chances you have to take. So if you want to take your place here, then _take_ it. Find the Gallery.”

“Where?” Seifer shouted, as best he could. He felt as though his own voice were growing tinny and flimsy and far away, as though soon he would fade into nothing and then he’d never be able to take anything at all, let alone a second chance.

“Down,” snorted his rescuer. “Down, down, down.”

And then Seifer had felt a jerk on the insubstantial parts of him that still existed. He began to feel like his eyes had been closed the whole time and he’d never realized. He opened them. Fujin and Raijin were staring down at him, concerned. They looked grubby, unhappy, and worried, but whole. They were, he thought wildly, though he’d never considered it before, very valuable people. Very good people. He wasn’t. He’d need to snatch goodness and value and worth back.

“What’s down?” he asked, apropos of nothing.

Fujin looked at Raijin. Raijin looked at Fujin.

“Is that, like, Galbadian soldier slang?” Raijin asked. “What’s down instead of what’s up? Makes sense. They’re backwards, ya know? Nothing’s down. Well. Okay. Maybe something has gone down. We think Squall won.”

“TAKING YOU HOME,” said Fujin.

Seifer barely processed this. He’d seen his true self. He’d seen his failure. But then, as was customary for him, he'd also seen a way out.

“I’m not going back to Garden,” he muttered. “I need to go down.”

“NOT GARDEN,” Fujin said. “OUR HOME.”

“Yeah,” Raijin said uncomfortably. “We’ll rest up at the Balamb hotel and then we’re taking you to FH, ya know? You need a breather. You’ve already hit rock bottom, Seifer. You’ve gone as far down as you can go, ya know?”

-

There was a small television in one of the waiting rooms in the Deling City train station, and on it Selphie got to see her boyfriend also hit rock bottom. It was seven months after Seifer had made the trip there.

Irvine’s voyage, unfairly enough, involved much more handcuffing. Not to mention the indignity of a sagging middle-aged prison guard giving Irvine a fatherly pat as he secured him for the transport back to Garden. Talking heads made sure to mention Irvine’s sexual proclivities as much as possible and to speculate about the kinds of behavior Garden might condone. One commended General Caraway for his brilliant arrest.

Rinoa tapped her fingers on her red book. Stuffed it into her bag. Tapped her fingers on her chair arms. Someone on the television called Caraway a great protector of Galbadian moral values. Rinoa’s tapping ceased. The chair next to her very quietly set itself on fire.

Selphie put it out. It was just as well that they were the only two people in this waiting room. Even if Rinoa hadn’t been feeling pyromaniacal, Selphie would still be feeling violent and unsettled. It was unpleasant enough to see Irvine slandered. When that happened, she couldn’t help but identify in him not the exciting, languid creature she was dating, but the sweet, unsure boy she’d known and defended to the rest of the orphanage gang ruffians. Her protective streak reared its head. If there had been Galbadians in here with the girls, offering their uninformed perspectives and jeering and discussing Irvine like he was something meant for communal dissection, Selphie might have been forced to do something very unwise.

As it was, she’d already let her inner aggressiveness get the better of her and now it reared its head on the television.

“I, personally, just don’t think Garden should be sending violent and immoral people into our city,” Tulip Ruta was saying. She was sitting in a powder blue parlor. She was now in a schoolgirl skirt and demure cardigan. She wore girlish pink ribbons in her nut-brown pigtails. “Personally, I think our nightclubs are going to attract people like Kinneas. But ever since Garden came public about SeeDs and what SeeDs are for, I just personally think they should be focusing on containing sorceresses. I don’t appreciate being threatened just when I’m going out for a drink.”

No mention was made of the fact that Caraway’s goons had been the first ones to threaten her. It simply seemed as though Tulip ( _Official’s Daughter, age 18_ said the caption underneath her) had stumbled unwittingly into a small nighttime café only to be menaced by Irvine. And actually, from how this was being spun, it looked like Caraway had sprung into action and called a raid on the club purely to catch lascivious SeeDs lurking in the shadows. Whatever the General had actually been doing? Sneaking, commandeering, destroying, politicking? No one bothered to even broach the topic.

“This is unbelievable!” Selphie said, furious. Angelo, under the seat, whined in agreement.

For one thing, even though it would have looked even worse for Garden to have two SeeDs caught out instead of one, she almost wished they'd mention her involvement. But no one did. If all they wanted to do was discredit Kramer’s kids, then Irvine made a sufficient scapegoat. After a night in lockup, he was stubbly and unkempt. He had a dangerous, low-class youth look to him, all bruised lip and too-tight trousers. His weapons and GFs – Exeter, short-range pistol, the ring that served as Siren’s manifest – were stripped from him publicly, laid out to be consumed by the cameras, then packed away before all the watchful eyes of the world to be shipped back a Garden, as a sign of the Deling Interim Commissioner’s good faith and willingness to abide by the agreement with Xu.

But the good faith thing didn't line up. There were no special rules that said SeeDs couldn’t frequent the city’s more questionable establishments. Just sections of their ceasefire that said they had to announce themselves and their business to appropriate authorities before coming within Deling limits. And that was just it. They had announced their business. No, not formally. Just to the freakin’ _General_ , and only when caught out. But they’d still announced it, which fulfilled the very hazy terms of their pact with Galbadia. And if Selphie knew Xu, then the Headmistress had sent out some misleading note to the Deling politicos as a CYA, since Xu was the queen of the CYA, and it would have been full of little technical points meant to clear her people in case of situations like this: _I remind you that our mutual nonaggression is paramount in such unstable times_ and _per the terms of our last agreement, SeeDs may not be limited in movement, their decisions must be given weight, and they are to be referred to Garden in matters of discipline_.

Plus, the overarching detail that every nation on earth publicly bowed to was: SeeD existed to protect the sorceress and protect others _from_ her. And Selphie and Irvine had technically abided by that in following her to Deling. Even if she hadn’t been anywhere near them at the time of Irvine’s arrest.

“Was the sorceress there?” a reporter asked Tulip Ruta.

Tulip had now acquired a fluffy white kitten. She petted it sweetly. She said, “I didn’t personally see her anywhere. I grew up with her, so I know her—“ 

Next to Selphie, Rinoa gave a very un-Rinoa-like snort. This seemed to insult her in some special indefinable way that required acknowledgment. 

“And, personally, even though she’s a sorceress now because personally she wasn't the most sensible person, I don’t think she would ever end up in a place like that, and I’m shocked that these are the kinds of people she hangs out with, but then just, like, speaking personally? She really was not the kind of girl to make an effort socially—“ 

“Balls,” Selphie told Rinoa, eager to defend her even to a total imbecile on the television. 

Rinoa seemed to be only half-listening. She shook her head and didn’t otherwise respond. 

“—and it’s really sad that SeeD are the only people who will put up with her. But no, I didn’t see her. I think personally her little bodyguard was only there for some fun.” 

Tulip’s cat sniffed. Tulip sniffed as well. The reporter sniffed. There was a regular sniff-circle going on, designed to show how very irresponsible and disgusting Irvine was. 

“I am going to end that girl,” Selphie told Rinoa. “ _Personally_.” 

Rinoa still didn’t respond. The reporters switched to discussing Garden over-involvement in Esthar and how Garden clearly favored the wicked East because of Squall Leonhart’s strong patrilineal ties to the region. This was beyond silly, because Squall’s father, the president of Esthar, was Galbadian by birth, even if that wasn’t common knowledge. But then there was a bigger game being played here. That seemed to be what Caraway and Deling City did. Played political games. Even if some people in the Deling City inner circle knew about Laguna and his background, it was not likely that they’d reveal it to anyone, since it benefitted them not at all to say that a Galbadian foot soldier had defected, hit the Timberi journalism racket, and eventually revolutionized Esthar for the better.

Just like, for some reason, it didn’t benefit them to mention that Selphie had been present in the club. Or to reveal the false cover story Missy had given Tulip. Or the false cover story that Selphie and Irvine had given Caraway. Admittedly, piecing together all the lies Selphie and Irvine had operated under had to be confusing. But that didn’t change the facts. Deling City probably had both cover stories in their possession right now, and they'd seen that Irvine junctioned Siren, with her magic-dampening abilities, so they might even know that SeeD was concerned about magic use. And they knew about the cadet at G-Garden who’d piqued SeeD’s interest, and they probably suspected that Garden was poking around for _some_ reason that Garden didn’t want to totally disclose. 

But they were playing all these cards close.

It made no sense. It couldn’t have hurt Deling City to come out and say that Selphie had been there too, or that the SeeDs had come in under the pretense of ferreting out a threat to the sorceress. If anything, insinuating that Selphie and Irvine had lied about that, or that they had only been trying to sneak into the seedier kind of club while neglecting their duties, would have done twice as much to damage Garden's reputation as a sniffy Tulip Ruta could do.

But Deling City wasn’t going there with the story. Why not?

Maybe because it would cut too close to something they wanted to hide.

“They’re in on it,” Selphie realized. “Maybe they knew from jump why we were here. And so they orchestrated—“

Rinoa made a swift cutting motion with her hand in Selphie’s direction. Rinoa wasn’t even looking at Selphie, and in fact her other hand was absorbed in twisting something in her lap, so it seemed for all the world like she was only vaguely aware she’d done it. But the end of Selphie’s sentence vanished. It had been there. Selphie had said it. Only now she hadn’t. Rinoa had plucked it out of existence.

Selphie stared at her, a little terrified, but mostly concerned. Rinoa didn’t do stuff like this. Rinoa wasn’t casual and comfortable with her powers. She handled her powers like a student desperate not to flunk a very unpleasant research project. She read, and learned, and compiled all she could on them. And then she proceeded through her daily life barely using what she'd learned, because all the information made her vaguely annoyed, and she hadn't really wanted to have to learn it.

“Rinoa, I have to ask again. Are you ok—“ Selphie began.

The whistle of the approaching train sounded. Rinoa was out of her seat in a flash, faster than Selphie had ever seen her move. She grabbed Selphie by the arm with a grip that was leagues beyond Rinoa’s usual level of strength.

“Kalm down,” she told Selphie, even though Selphie was fairly sure she’d actually been doing a stellar job of staying calm. “We will talk at Garden.”

She tugged Selphie out of the waiting room, into the greater station Hall, and down the escalator to where the latest express to Balamb had pulled in. No one asked them for their tickets as they got on because heads simply looked away as Rinoa passed, and in her haste to get on the train Rinoa herself seemed not to notice this. Angelo whined at their heels until they reached their designated compartment, where she vanished under the seats. Rinoa manhandled Selphie inside, then took a seat at the window and propped her elbow on the sill, leaning into her hand. Her brow furrowed. Her face changed subtly, going from deliberation to confusion to snappish annoyance, like she was dealing with things Selphie couldn’t see or understand, operating on another level entirely, the way she was when she had to talk to her father.

Actually, it looked a lot like Rinoa was having a conversation. Only not with Caraway this time. With unseen voices in her head.

Selphie had been calm (if angry and a little scared) before. But now she was freaking out. She crept up to Rinoa as the train started up. Rinoa seemed not to notice the train, so hopefully she wouldn’t notice Selphie. And so Selphie could try and coax her out of…whatever this was, and, barring that, she could cast sleep or something, and then at Garden they could figure out what was going on with her, why her powers seemed to have short-circuited her brain.

Rinoa reached out a hand before Selphie got close and grabbed Selphie's wrist.

Crap.

“It kan wait, Selphie,” she said calmly. Then she did something weird. She took the things she’d been fiddling with in her other hand and dropped them into Selphie’s hands instead. Her Manifests. The bangle that tied her to Leviathan. Alexander’s simple white seal. These things weren’t necessary for Rinoa to use magic, of course. She wasn’t dependent on GFs; she was a sorceress and had her own power, not to mention that their encounter with Adel had shown that she was as good as a GF herself and could be junctioned like one, given someone sick enough and powerful enough to try.

But it was still bizarre that she would give up her Manifests. It was a point of pride for her boyfriend that no one would dare challenge her right to use Garden GFs, and for that matter a point of pride among her friends as well. They didn’t technically consider the GFs their own personal magic store, of course not. That was highly discouraged. GFs were Garden property, and offered to the SeeDs on largesse. All of them had acknowledged that and had delivered up many a GF for use monster-hunting in Esthar. Their group wasn’t greedy.

But still. GFs meant power. They were the edge in just about any battle. When you got really good, something in you seemed to call to the more dangerous monsters out there. Moon monsters sniffed out strength and wanted to destroy it; that was the impulse that propelled them down to earth via the crystal pillar, according to Odine. The pillar gave off a kind of attraction to them, a hidden strength; it was some kind of beacon for stray magic. And the more powerful you were, the more you were basically indistinguishable from the pillar for them, and the more you could expect the really tough ones to come after you. But GFs still tore through them with alarming effectiveness. So. No one really wanted to give them up. Even Irvy, who had a complex relationship with them and who Selphie suspected really hated them, wouldn’t have handed Siren over unless it had come to—well. Arrest.

“Sooo, am I just holding onto these for you, or…?” Selphie said, disconcerted. 

Rinoa waved her away and went back to making faces at the window. 

Alright. Casting sleep it was. Not because Rinoa was doing anything dangerous right now, unless you counted her sudden death grip. But her weird quiet, her speech patterns, her unacknowledged magic use – it added up to potential danger. And Selphie really didn’t want anything else to go wrong before she regrouped with her friends and figured out what to do about it. If it turned out that Rinoa’s powers were finally going wrong and she was a threat to the world, then probably it was better to knock the girl out before Xu figured it out. Because then they’d not only have to drag her to Esthar to fix her (again), but they’d have to fight Garden while doing it. Selphie knew for a fact that Xu was a creative thinker and had already lined up a whole bunch of plans in case it came to that, and she really didn’t want to test their luck or Rinoa’s by tipping Xu off and seeing those plans fall into motion.

Selphie slipped the bangle on. Affixed the seal to her blouse. Took a second to acquaint herself with the two new personalities in her head, subtly taking stock of their abilities and nudging them towards the kinds of battle tactics she preferred, the way she’d been taught at T-Garden. Then she raised one hand behind her back and prepared to cast on her friend, feeling slightly traitorous all the while.

Selphie’s phone rang.

Rinoa jolted up and stared straight at her, spooked by the noise. Dammit. There went Selphie’s chance to cast sleep surreptitiously. The phone rang again. And again and again and again. Selphie had given up and answered it by the time Rinoa had turned back and resumed her k-heavy discussion with the voices in her head. Which couldn’t even be her GFs at this point, since she’d given up her GFs.

“I need your help,” Quistis said, as soon as Selphie answered the call. “I’ve lost control of my team!”

Well, that made two of them.

Quistis outlined a nightmare scenario, alone and trapped between Cid’s skeevy secrets and two screaming teammates who wouldn’t wake up. Selphie genuinely felt sorry for her, even if her own situation was just as dire and twice as infuriating. And even if she couldn’t figure out why Quistis was calling her. Sure, Xu was busy and it was, like, four am where Quistis was, and Quistis was alone, and possibly Zell was wetting the bed? Maybe? It didn’t sound like Zell. It did sound like maybe Quistis was just afraid of that happening. But Selphie was several thousand miles away and no expert on falling asleep and not waking u—

Or. Actually.

“Ellone?” Selphie offered.

“What?” said Quistis.

Keeping a careful eye on Rinoa, Selphie crossed to the seat opposite her and sat down, then unpacked what she knew about sleeping creepy. Ellone. Ellone did that. That was the Ellone thing.

“Okay, so, like, it happened to you too, right? You remember. We’d fall asleep, only not really,” Selphie said. “We’d be in the middle of a mission –”

Quistis said, “You mean when she sent us to Laguna's time? We never started _screaming_ that I could recall, and—“

“No, but then you don’t know where Squall and Zell are,” Selphie said. “You don’t know who they are. I mean, you were Ward one time, right? He's not exactly a screamer. And then Kiros. I was Kiros once too. Do you want to know who the suavest, least panicky person in the world is? Kiros. Kiros could suffer through, I don’t know, one of those world-ending apocalypses in those books Nida reads, and be fine. And mostly he was just running around making sure Laguna didn’t waste all their money anyway.”

“So you think Ellone’s stuck them in the mind of someone suffering? Sent them back to face some kind of trauma? Why would she do that?”

“Why would she pick you and me for Kiros or Ward at different times?” Selphie said, shrugging. “Ellone works in mysterious ways.”

“And it wasn’t like she thought about it then. Maybe she’s not thinking about the consequences now, either,” Quistis said. “She took us out of commission during a pretty serious time.”

Ellone had basically been putting them in danger in order to unravel and change her own past. Which wasn’t so great. She was a sweet girl, she’d been nice to them in Esthar, and Selphie vaguely remembered her as being fun to play with as a kid. But whoa: did that chick have problems. Selphie wasn’t going to hold it against her: the actual experience of living as Ward Zabac and Kiros Seagill had been kind of fun. But getting there had had its rough points.

“I wonder if she knows how rat fink it was of her," Selphie mused. "Remember? I liked it, but it didn't feel nice at first. Like, like that moment when you’re exhausted. Only I wasn't feeling tired until she messed with me. There I was, happy and perky—“

“Yeah,” Quistis said. “She messed with our heads. Induced sleep. But Zell and Squall just fell asleep on their own.”

“Well, maybe that just means she wouldn’t have had to induce it,” Selphie said. “They were already tired, so she didn't have to do it for them. Weird, how being tired is a part of it."

"So tired you don’t really feel like _you_ ," Quistis said. 

"Right," Selphie agreed, remembering. "And that other feeling! Remember? Not exactly dizziness. More like everything you should be feeling around you hits you through a filter, and you can’t really control your body because it’s suddenly so heavy. You're all twitchy. It’s like it’s not even your body anymore, and—“

Selphie stopped. Rinoa was looking at her. Very intently. With that same indefinable witchiness to her, that disconcerting element lurking in her eyes.

“Selphie?” Quistis said.

“Keep going,” Rinoa said calmly.

Selphie had no idea why Rinoa should be so suddenly devoted to this particular topic. But her instincts told her to do as her sorceress friend said, because her sorceress friend was unpredictable and creepy and maybe more than a little dangerous right now. So Selphie added, “You feel like, like you could almost be outside your body for a sec. Ellone whammies you with that. And then she takes you away. You’ve fallen asleep, you think, but really what happens is you’re suddenly inside a dream. But the dream is—“

“Somebody else’s life,” Rinoa murmured. “You’re connected to them.”

She’d been interested in their Ellone travels before, but she’d never looked quite so satisfied or intense about it. Polite and engaged was Rinoa’s thing. Not crazy-eyed like this.

“Is that Rinoa?” Quistis said. “Don’t tell her about Squall! I mean. Well. Okay. Maybe do, since he is her boyfriend. But she’s just going to worry, and she’s not a SeeD.”

“Don’t tell me what about Squall?” Rinoa said, evidently equipped with super-sorceress hearing. And even though Quistis was cursing on the other end of the line, Selphie was a little relieved. Because when she heard ‘Squall,’ something in Rinoa’s eyes seemed to snap back into focus. She became a little bit more herself again. Selphie didn’t know how she knew this; she just did. It was in how suddenly it was nice to have Rinoa looking at her again. It wasn’t chilling.

Rinoa got up and held out her hand for the phone. Selphie debated whether to give it to her. Rinoa right now was better than she’d been all evening; hearing about Squall might stabilize her. But the news about Squall wasn’t exactly good, and it wasn’t like she and Rinoa could do anything about it just then, and what if the upset sent her off the deep end? Selphie was SeeD-trained to handle terrible scenarios like theirs and Quistis’ without letting dire developments cloud her judgment. Rinoa, while a real champ about keeping up with SeeD most of the time, wasn’t so trained.

Rinoa plucked the decision out of Selphie’s hands. Because, quick as a flash, she also plucked up the phone. She put it to her ear and said, “Tell me.”

Selphie watched uneasily as Quistis’s barely-audible patter filled Rinoa in. Rinoa’s face became stony. Oddly, there wasn’t much change to her beyond that. She simply took the news in. And all she said was, “Did you cast silence? And make sure they’re not moving around too much so they don’t hurt themselves?”

Both solid suggestions, SeeD-worthy suggestions, and apparently also suggestions that had occurred to Quistis.

“Good,” Rinoa said. “Then the next step is to get them back to Garden. Do that. We’ll meet you there.” She was being unusually brusque, for Rinoa, but her tone wasn’t unkind. She handed the phone back to Selphie. Selphie was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to improve on Rinoa’s advice, so all she said was, “Then we can hunt down Ellone and figure out why this is happening. It’s, like, going on the middle of the night in Esthar and she’s a pain to get in touch with, but once we’re back at Garden we can put an official stamp on it and she’ll _have_ to talk to us!”

Squall, had he been conscious, would probably not have approved of handling Sis in this manner. Like she was just some stranger, like she wasn’t Sis anymore. But that was the thing. As far as Selphie knew, she _was_ some stranger at this point. Ellone had some contact with Squall and was always welcoming when the group dropped by Esthar. But she had effectively cut ties with Garden, and besides this she’d never fully explained or even apologized about the whole sending them back in time thing.

Plus, given what she was apparently doing to Squall and Zell, this time she’d really overstepped. 

“That’s one option,” Rinoa said, sitting calmly back down. “We can brainstorm more and vote on it when the rest of us are all together. Me, you, Quistis, Irvine.” 

And that was her final word. She was silent and focused on something all the way to Garden, though weirdly twitchy about noises and so on her guard every time Selphie tried to cast anything that after a while Selphie just gave up. Rinoa seemed more in control of her magic after touching base with Quistis, so that was good. She didn’t force the crowds of Balamb to part when they arrived. Of course, that was probably because there were no crowds in Balamb. Balamb had a population of like a hundred people. Rinoa glided mostly magic-less down the path to Garden, and if they encountered no monsters on the way then Selphie was going to be an optimist and put it down to luck instead of magic. Still-- 

“You aren’t scared about showing up in front of Xu like…this?” she asked Rinoa.

Rinoa said, “Like what? There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Selphie begged to differ.

“Really? We’re going with that?” she asked Rinoa. “You’ve been pretty weird.”

Rinoa fixed her with a surprisingly apologetic look. “I know,” she said. “I’ll tell you when we’re at Garden.”

But in Xu’s office, it became clear that when she said ‘we’, she meant more than just herself and Selphie.

“I know what’s going on in Deling,” she announced. “But I need Squall here when I explain it. And Zell. And Quistis and Irvine. Now. So bring them in and then I’ll tell you.”

Xu raised an eyebrow as though to indicate that she doubted Rinoa knew anything and doubted even more that she was going to be taking any orders from Rinoa. Next to her, Nida nodded amicably at the news that Rinoa had supposedly cracked a major case down in Deling, then returned to a fat book on the Ancient Centrans.

“Rinoa, that’s nice,” Xu said, “But your failure to stick with your team got one of my people – an actual SeeD, by the by – arrested, and we’re still no closer to getting our hands on the GF—“

Something about this made Rinoa smile.

“Don’t worry about that,” she said.

Xu stared at her, irritated. Then she stared at Selphie. Selphie shrugged.

“Bring in Squall and Zell and Quistis and Irvine—“ Rinoa said.

“Squall and Zell and Quistis are on a mission,” Xu said irritably.

Nida cleared his throat. “About that,” he began.

When he was done explaining, Xu looked ready to murder someone. Selphie felt for her. She expected Rinoa to feel for her, too, because Rinoa was a feel for you kind of person, but when she looked over Rinoa was only fiddling with the two rings she always wore on a chain.

Something else about her was different, Selphie realized. Something besides the weird disconnect from her usual self. Something small. It took Selphie a second to get what.

“That’s a nice choker, Rinoa,” she said. Xu was in the process of chewing Nida out with laser-focus and no small amount of cruelty and didn’t hear her, and so didn’t chastise her for chatting with Rinoa during a debrief.

Rinoa’s hand flew up to touch her new choker. It was loosely draped on her, a long silver oblong shape nestled slightly below her collarbone. Selphie noticing it made her look almost apprehensive for some reason.

“It looks familiar,” Selphie said, because it did, but she couldn’t place how. “I think I’ve seen it before?”

Probably Rinoa had worn it at some other point in time. But she just gave a nervous smile. She didn’t say anything to confirm it.


	12. Chapter 12

At the edge of the black grounds, where Catkin’s men had disappeared, stood an odd trio. Fujin: thinner than normal, faded, sick. Cid: oddly impassioned; a round, determined little man. And Rellia?

She was angry.

“You don't need me,” Rellia pointed out to Cid. “You could do it, even if it’ll take the life out of someone as old as you. And if you’re going to Trabia instead, you have Edea. Isn’t she out there right now? Trying to keep people from hating her too much?”

Cid said, sighing, “We may have reached a difficult period in our marriage. The intimate bond—”

“YUCK,” Fujin interrupted, tugging Seifer’s coat around her to ward off the chill. “DISGUSTING. DON’T CARE.”

“Fair enough,” Cid said sadly. Then, as though he didn’t at all mind that Rellia didn’t want to go with them, he turned to Fujin and said, “What do you know of how GFs work?”

Fujin put up her hands and made air quotes. “’NO MEMORY LOSS.’ ‘DON’T TRUST CRITICS.’ ‘PERFECTLY SAFE.’”

Rellia didn’t get this and it must have shown on her face, because Fujin then turned to her and added, “TRAINING MANUAL. CID’S.”

Cid sighed again.

“Yes, she is throwing my words back in my face,” he said sadly. “I may have been wrong in putting that together, but—“

Rellia tuned him out. She took in Fujin’s skinny, shivering figure – shivering more because of blood loss over the past few days than genuine cold, she thought – and considered what she knew about slippery Cid Kramer, and all those kids out in Balamb who worshipped the ground he walked on. Apparently one of them was coming around. Good.

Fujin was a good kid. And Rellia wouldn’t want to leave _her_ kid alone with Cid—

“Which, you see, is why we need you,” Cid finished triumphantly, now apparently addressing her.

Whatever. Rellia was just making up her mind to come along anyway.

But Fujin held out a hand, stopping her.

“NO,” she said. “DANGEROUS. ASK WITCH EDEA.”

That Fujin had dropped into slurs when referring to Cid’s wife said something of how she felt about the woman. Rellia would have taken offense, but she felt similarly about Edea herself, and anyway, she thought she liked the stricken look that danced across Cid’s face. But that didn’t erase the fact that using Edea would probably make the whole enterprise more dangerous for _Fujin_. Cid wouldn’t throw his wife away, in a pinch. But he might toss a Garden cadet out like trash if he thought it served his aims. Hadn’t he put Fujin to this whole harebrained enterprise in the first place?

And her sister would kill her if something happened to Fujin, she was sure of it.

But Fujin only waved her off.

“You can’t trust him—” Rellia began.

“NO ONE ELSE,” Fujin said. “GO HOME.” 

“If you don’t come back—“ 

“TELL XU,” Fujin said. 

“You were going to tell your sister anyway. Be honest. That’s why we selected you,” Cid put in. 

-

So, on the morning of the 20th, Cid and Fujin set out alone to meet Edea. Cid attempted to explain his hesitancy in these matters. Fujin was resolutely not hearing it. So he switched to discussing GFs and Knights.

He had a very perplexing theory about GFs and Knights.

-

Putting Selphie and Rinoa on her case seemed to bring Quistis results. Xu was soon phoning Quistis, sounding increasingly irate underneath her veneer of icy calm. She had a White SeeD detail out to collect them and take them back to Garden within the hour. The White SeeDs weren't exactly under Xu’s jurisdiction. Quistis wasn’t sure how she’d commandeered them. It was just a talent of Xu’s to wrangle all the resources and all the manpower when people weren’t looking. Xu had never needed to be a good fighter or especially intelligent or card club king or anything to be crucial to Garden. She was a born politician, and that was far more useful.

Xu would soon have all the GFs well within Garden’s purview. That seemed to be the goal, anyway, going by Cid’s GF list. Quistis had it spread out before her on the deck next to her phone and everything else she’d taken from his place: the translated poem, the strip of bloody sheet, Seifer’s book.

It _was_ Seifer’s. Not hers. It had been meant for Seifer. Quistis tried not to be too resentful. Seifer had lost, after all.

That was just. That was right. He’d deserved to lose. Quistis didn’t feel bad about that. She did, however, recognize that she was perhaps the sorest winner in the world. Restored to her position, rank A, considered a fashion trendsetter from here to Winhill, with an entire radio show devoted to figuring out where she would next be seen... These were the accoutrements of fame, though they weren’t always nice to deal with. Even so. She would probably be able to retire at thirty and live out her days in a Dolletian mansion if she wanted. She could command crowds – hell, with the Trepies, she already _did_. This was winning.

It wasn’t enough. It didn’t fix how she felt about herself. And Seifer Almasy, loser that he was, lacking all those things that Squall and the rest of the orphanage gang had managed to snatch from him, was out there somewhere, coolly rebuffing Matron and Cid. Probably completely satisfied with himself, with the decisions that he’d made. Feeling as though he’d won. Even though he hadn’t, and so he should have been as miserable and grateful for any scrap of affection as Quistis was.

Seifer didn't owe it to her to be unhappy, she knew. But she resented him for always being her opposite in that sense, always being comfortable in himself. 

Screw Seifer. 

She snatched up his book. _The Nature of the Knight_. Florlina Drinnaks. Timber Independent Press. At least twenty years old, but in wonderful condition, which was rare for something out of Timber, where Deling’s people had been bookburning for years. It must have cost Matron a nice lump of gil to obtain it. Seifer probably hadn’t even thought about that, or cared if he had. 

Quistis told herself that she was reading it because she was bored, not out of a bitter need to snatch up the knowledge Seifer had so carelessly rejected. She had nothing to do anyway. The White SeeDs were handling navigation, and Zone and Watts – Rinoa’s old chums who now contracted with the White SeeDs to run missives from Timber to Esthar and back as a means of forging political alliance – had agreed to look after Squall and Zell. Zone and Watts had a compulsive need to look after Rinoa’s interests even now, even though they seemed to consider her terminally ill with a bad case of magic. Rinoa was like that. She didn't have groupies. Even now, poisoned with sorcery in the eyes of the world, she retained sincerely devoted friends.

Quistis would have to ask her her secret. She opened the book. Matron’s hand had scrawled out a message of love on the frontispiece. It wasn't for Quistis to read.

Bitterly, Quistis turned the page.

-

The Nature of the Knight  
 _Foreword_

It has been some time since I published the first edition of this book, and it is curious to me that the book should be so reviled now. At the time of publishing I believed its brother, _The Nature of the Summon_ , to be much more revolutionary.

Knights occupy a strange place in our culture. In this volume, I sought to uncover the truth of them, the truth of our history with these aggressors. I found instead only a succession of curious personalities. Vasko Phipps, a minor Timberi Knight whose sorceress, Mad Ada, is known only for a prophecy that signaled the end of their fair city. Jana Ki, who might have been a sorceress herself, but who repudiated the powers of her dead mistress, the wicked sorceress Anuket. Caliban Bajo, the mutilated child survivor of Ancient Zuniga's final moments, who seized arms to best his conqueror, the Warlord-King of Esthar.

Knights seek the perverse. They claim allegiance to the sorceress, enemy of man. Accordingly, many of them are villainous. Daemon Carteret, ancestor to the Delings, is best known for his destruction of the great Acenath empire and for attempting to drown his own sons in tar. Iseult Neve is said to have abandoned her own father in the glacial wilds of Northern Trabia. Ignotus Romulus supposedly burned his best friend alive. But these nightmare caricatures are relegated to books these days. In their place we have Miss Kerr. Much is made of her sharp tongue, her clever cruelty, her penchant for legalized massacre. This is all very normal for a Knight. Knights are agents of evil.

But that is the broad strokes reading. Seen one by one, there appears a strange sliver of humanity in them as well. That is what I have tried to demonstrate here: what makes them, in the end, simply people. This is why, I think, the book has seemed so profane in the current political climate. Human beings cannot stand to recognize themselves in others when it would serve their purposes to deny any connection. Enflamed as the world is by Miss Kerr and the sorceress Adel, no one wishes to hear of the Knights of old as anything other than a menace, let alone as people like you or I. But I have not looked on them as simply menaces. Some of them were that, but in truth I feel that is a mark of some individuals, a result of some choices, not the fated end to all Knights, and not a taint on the breed.

All Knights are different. Unique. As all people are.

What they have in common with each other is this: they have desired to fight the status quo, the traditional view of magic and its relation to humanity. They allied themselves with magic. We believe, from children’s stories, from the tales of Hyne, that mankind and magic are opposed. We believe that Fate (the cruelest magic-user of all) places sorceresses in the world to torment us. We believe that sorceresses must all go wrong, go unnatural, go bloodthirsty. 

Knights do not think this way.

There is one Knight I did not include in this text. His story is apocryphal and many believe he never existed. So I began this book, after some hemming and hawing, with the Knight respected historians acknowledge as the sole first Knight: Valknut Wardegrave. Wardegrave was Knight to Usra, who waged war against Vascaroon. We have on good account that Wardegrave truly existed. Usra we simply suspect did, because to be a Knight Wardegrave must have had a sorceress. But ‘Usra’ is little more than a placeholder name. Scholars say that it means ‘first’ in tongues that we have obliterated from the earth. It stands for the earliest sorceress we can pinpoint, one whose identity was erased from time. We have little concrete knowledge of Usra: only that she named herself enemy to Vascaroon, the man who revealed Hyne’s deception to humanity and who exposed her magic. 

Compared to her second Knight, however, Usra is something of a celebrity.

Professor Bustamante of Deling City University claims that the notion of a second Knight is absurd. One Knight for every sorceress. That is the maxim. Or at least one Knight at a time, as some sorceresses have liked to dispose of unworthy Knights, then take new ones. Even the Hillfin brothers, so close they shared a wife, served separate sorceresses: the Acenath princesses Kande and Kissa. A sorceress with two Knights is the stuff of fantasy, of horror stories used to frighten children. So now we come to the horror story of Usra’s second knight.

It is really the story of Vascaroon in another form. Some of you will have heard it already. I apologize for the repetition and beg your indulgence. My version has some variations, a few new details. I entreat you to read it closely.

Legends revere Vascaroon as a hero. But he was not a hero, because heroes, say our Deling City presses, are simple soldiers who would die for Deling and country. I have no opinion on the topic. I am simply a voracious reader who knows a good deal of history, particularly the history of curious and ancient things. I can therefore report with some authority that Vascaroon would never have died for any country. He preferred to molder away in a tower. He was an academic, a pencil-pusher of the Zebalga Dynasty, a royal scholar. His chief discipline was the study of magic, which the Zebalga were obsessed with claiming for themselves. To their chagrin, magic belonged to Hyne and the monsters. Hyne they could not touch. They tried, but Vascaroon proved this to be a foolish endeavor. Hyne’s magical half rested in sorceresses, and was not for the Zebalga to possess.

Monsters were a different story. The Zebalga made sport of catching and breeding moon monsters, and doing the same to any curious creature that caught their eye, many now regarded as fantastical and or at least extinct: lions, wolves, sharks, bears. Being Ancient Centrans, the Zebalga also did things in the sensational Ancient Centran manner, constructing floating cities hovering atop mountains, wondrously advanced palaces that could fly, and entire districts connected to the earth only by the thinnest of cables. But they were willing to plunge into the earth as well, to capture magical creatures and dig up bones and similar treasures, from which they hoped they could obtain monster magic. They established trading links from the heavens down to the core of hell, pipelines through which to exchange new beasts, and out of these beasts their scholars – among them Vascaroon – refined the first potions and phoenix downs, refined remedies, created ways to snatch magic for use by man.

It was not enough.

The Zebalga longed for an Odine, I think, for someone who could give them magic of their own. But GFs did not exist then, or at least were not recorded in any ancient documents, and so junctioning was a thing of the distant future. They were not to have an Odine. They had merely a Vascaroon. Perhaps, given the rumors circling around that esteemed Estharian Doctor and his preferred test subjects, this was for the better.

However, perhaps not. 

Vascaroon, too, experimented on people. All the great scholars of the Zebalga did: the alchemists, the monster breeders, the surgeons, the biologists, the metalworkers who sought to meld man and machine. And it was not simply slaves or criminals or captured enemies or helpless children that they worked on. The elite among the Zebalga sought to be stronger, more magical. Vascaroon and his fellow scholars made these dreams reality for them. They created intelligent beings with far more magic than man has ever dreamt of: Shumi and Moogles. They invented useful mounts: chocobos. They unwittingly bred curious oddities: Tonberrys. And in these small ways, they succeeded in combining monster and human. They snatched magic back for man, in a sense, though by the time they'd finished their subjects were men no longer.

Vascaroon regarded these beings as a failure. He wanted to make something greater still. He wanted to invent something with all the powers of Hyne, who had cut his magic away and offered up to humanity only his dead, worthless skin. He wanted to create something that could extract magic in the same fashion: a natural power distiller. He wanted a creature that could alight upon a beast and, without excessive experimentation, simply seize up the magic inside it, tear the magic from the non-magic parts, and offer it that magic to the Zebalga.

The _draw_ technique that Odine has developed would have astounded and pleased Vascaroon, I think.

But draw was beyond the technology or understanding of his time. Instead, Vascaroon and his cronies designed a cutting creature, a natural magic thief, a being that could split one in two and from the laceration harvest perfect power. In the recipe, the alchemical mixture, they combined all those things that claw and tear and destroy. They began with the bodies of their ancient enemies, the fearsome early Estharians, harvested from battlefields and still containing just a breath of life. In these the surgeons, under Vascaroon’s direction, replaced key components: human brain lobes they supplanted with the lion’s roaring instinct, and heart valves they nudged aside to make way for excess chambers stolen from the ruby dragon. The monster breeders supplied these parts and more, delivered up flanks of behemoths and the claws of bears: anything that possessed the power to bite and snatch. The metalworkers, trafficking in substances that conduct electricity, fiddled with synapses; the biologists mapped out the areas in which new enzymes could be introduced, where the body might be altered to better make a human cleaver. But the crowning glory came from the alchemists, of which Vascaroon was the leader. They took the pieces of Hyne’s skin, powerless but possessing significant propagandistic value, and transmuted it into liquid, and this they injected into the blood, and so the very capillaries of these new beings, while no more magical than they had been before, became, in a sense, connected to Hyne.

At last they were ready. Vascaroon’s children. The creatures that could rip magic from others.

The Zebalga awaited the moment when they would open their eyes. Their conquered slaves held moon monsters at the ready. These monsters were to be ripped open, their magic stolen; they were to be the first test subjects. The king of the Zebalga, long-convinced that Hyne had hidden his best magic inside the earth, gave orders to open the mouth of their pipeline there. They would unleash Vascaroon’s creations on hell itself, and take from hell the magic hidden away by Hyne and lost to them, buried too deep to be accessed before now. 

But when Vascaroon’s creatures awoke, they did not jump to harvest magic from hell. They held out hands to the assembled crowd and every one of the Zebalga began to feel simultaneously weightless and very heavy indeed. Their bodies dropped out from under them, falling in heaps as though every being in the city were suddenly going to sleep right where they stood, and their souls, their minds, their consciousness floated upwards. Ripped from them. The great floating city gave a heave and a shudder; the controllers who kept it afloat had lost their minds and fallen into a slump at their posts. The massive flying palaces careened into the Centran mountaintops, and the soulless bodies had no choice to yield to gravity, dropping onto the hillsides below, painting the slopes leading down into the Kashkabald with blood.

The Zebalga had created these creatures to rip magic away from unassuming beasts and even from sorceresses themselves, but they'd forgotten something. Ordinary humans have something very like magic as well. It is the great engine that propels us, the inner sense of self, the accouterments of identity – it is the part of us that is not the body, but merely trapped within it. Vascaroon, without realizing it, had created a mechanism to set this great insubstantial human-ness free.

Where did they go? All those souls? No one knows. But when they were done harvesting these things, Vascaroon’s creations stepped over his soulless body, slipped along the halls of that palace hurtling to the ground, and, monstrous and secure, jumped to safety.

And so began an era of terror in the world. Everywhere they went these beasts performed their function, cleaving man from himself in search of the magic they believed he possessed. Until they should alert the sorceress: Usra. Usra had long opposed the Zebalga’s experiments, and was not surprised to find that they had created a monster to end all monsters. She herself was safe from them, of course. As the world’s foremost magic user, she reigned supreme, and had long shut herself and her people up in a city on the Northern Centra island, an invisible fortress against the Zebalga searching to take Hyne’s magic from her.

Now she considered perhaps revealing herself. An evil spread throughout the world in the form of these new creatures, and she suspected that only she could defeat it.

Her Knight, Valknut Wardegrave, would not fight them. He had long done her bidding and cut down many a Zebalga soldier. In the process, he'd taken up a hatred of that particular people. He believed them to be well-served by their creations, and though now these final beasts spread across Centra in a swath of devastation, leaving only soulless husks behind, he was unmoved. Too long had he seen his sorceress slandered by humanity. Now that she considered protecting people, he took her for foolish. He was interested only in salvaging those bits of the Zebalga empire that had survived complete annihilation for use by Usra’s people. He would hunt after echo screens, elixirs, useful new inventions. But their enemies’ monsters, he said, could continue to roam the world, bringing fear and death to all opponents of the sorceress.

Usra’s domain would be eternal, and the reign of mankind short and terrible by comparison, and this, Wardegrave believed, was only fair. 

Saddened, Usra gave in to his demands, and as the world burned around them, the followers of the sorceress sought only to pluck prizes from the wreckage, like carrion-eaters.

Save one man. Little is known of him. His name is lost to time – he identified himself as a common scoundrel, and appeared in Usra’s city claiming the identity of a penitent, a wretch who needed to atone. He wished to pledge himself to the sorceress. She did not wish to accept him. But then he revealed a curious power. He had no soul to steal.

_How can this be?_ Usra asked.

_I am powerless in every sense,_ said the man. _I am weightless already. I am nothing, merely a husk. Should these monsters attempt to strip away the soul in me, they would find nothing. Should they try to rip away my essence, they would come away with empty hands._

This made him the perfect weapon: he could fight the Zebalga’s creations instead of merely hiding from them. And so Usra took him as her second Knight. But one man alone could not fight an entire army of beasts. Usra realized she would have to use cunning, not force, and devised a plan. She challenged the monsters to come to her fortress, told them outright that she’d taken a Knight expressly to defeat them.

The monsters came in droves. Her second Knight fought them, giving no quarter. There were many of them to begin with, for Vascaroon had been ambitious in their creation, and they had bred in the time it took Usra to prepare her plan. But, just as it seemed her second Knight’s strength would fail, the sorceress Usra opened her mouth and spoke a single word, an Evocation, an ancient word of power in the language of Hyne. And the ground beneath her domain shuddered, and it bent to her will. She had studied the pipeline the Zebalga had built to the center of the earth, to Hell, to the Underworld. Now she replicated it, causing the ground to swallow whole the Rippers.

For that is what they were. Bogeymen. Children’s fears. Underworld Rippers. And to keep them from climbing back to the surface of the world, Usra placed her first knight, Wardegrave, as a watchman at the gates of her ruined city, above the spot where they were buried, and that is why there we find so much compelling archeological evidence of Wardegrave’s existence.

Her second Knight? The one who fought the Rippers? We do not know what became of him. Perhaps the Rippers dragged him down to Hell, where they roam forevermore, though parents who wish their children not to wander will tell them that, now and then, a Ripper sneaks up to the surface of the world in search of souls to rip away.

A curious story, so fantastic it must be untrue. But I see some meaning in it. We do not believe it, but still we tell it. We tell children that it was man who made the monsters. We tell them that it was a sorceress and her Knight who protected man. This is a bedtime story, or perhaps a story to make a campfire more chilling than it needs to be, but I think it is also the narrative that exists in the minds of the Knights. In their minds, they are not villains. The world calls them scoundrels, but they see themselves as protectors.

This is the key to understanding the Knights.

There is more to say on the topic of Knights and GFs. I have sprinkled my works with steps to my ultimate thesis, to a truth so stunning that it may shock the world to the core. But, like Vascaroon, I am an academic, and a good academic always checks her sources, so I bid my publisher adieu and go to seek out the truth, or at least the stories that may give rise to the truth. And when I return I will perhaps connect the dots for you, my faithful readers.

Your devoted author,  
 _Florlina Drinnaks_

-

Zell woke up on the way to Garden, and he woke by screaming his way out of his dream, lurching upwards in complete defiance of Quistis’s spell on him (his GFs hadn't liked being confined, and might have helped him a little), and punching Watts in the jaw. Watts went down like gravity had suddenly taken a special liking to him and decided to tone it up, just for him, just this once, just to make it special. 

Zone gave a high shriek and tried to fade into the wall of the small cabin.

It took Zell a second to process where he was, feel apologetic, discover Squall motionless and silently screaming, and decide to find Quistis. He picked Watts up and passed him off to his friend. Probably the guy needed medical attention. Zell patted them both in apology, his mind elsewhere, his thoughts not yet settled. Then he went up to the White SeeD deck. 

It was a big ship. It took him a while to find his bearings for that reason. And also because he was still shaken. He didn’t feel like himself. He felt like someone had lifted him up, transported him into another life.

Raijin’s.

Raijin’s? Why Raijin’s? Zell didn't like Raijin, not in any way, shape, or form.

This dislike wasn't personal. Or, well, _Zell_ hadn’t made it personal. He’d always been kind to Raijin. In training, in class, in line for hot dogs, while nonchalantly reading Pupurun in that corner of the library where no one could find them and make fun of them for reading Pupurun. If it had been up to Zell, he and Raijin could have had an easy camaraderie. Maybe not been best friends or anything. That was inconceivable: being friends with a member of DC. But even so. Zell had always treated Raijin well. And actually, in those spare moments when it was just the two of them, Raijin had never had a cruel word to offer Zell. Raijin generally didn’t say cruel things. Probably you had to be capable of independent thought to come up with cruel things to say.

Raijin had always come on the heels of a pack: the Disciplinary Committee. And he wasn’t the pack leader, so maybe Zell had never hated him as much as he’d hated certain other people (Seifer; this was a dig at Seifer), but then what did that matter? Raijin had always been there in the background, cheering on his chosen ringleader. The born follower. There to watch as Zell got written up for pretend infractions; there to occupy Zell’s hometown on his friend’s stupid orders. 

Up until the occupation of Balamb Zell’s dislike for Raijin hadn’t even been that intense. Zell had, in many ways, wanted to be liked by the DC. He wanted to be liked by everybody; no one liked being disliked. But the DC were a special case, because the DC had always thought that they were, well. Special. And in a weird way they had been. Swaggering troublemakers and hypocrites, sure. But they had a special place in Garden, because they held themselves apart. They would never stoop so low as to be sociable, kind, fair, even moderately respectful. Instead they were all, even dumb lunk Raijin, standouts. 

The DC – though they were stupid, unthinking, and bad at following orders – had had _style_. 

It was in their strut, their constant unity. It was in their secret references to stupid lists, their ability to master difficult topics, their open disregard for the Shumi guardians, their unique weapons. Seifer had been the only one to share his specialty with another Garden cadet in their unit – Squall – and didn’t _that_ stick in his craw. But that was alright, because Seifer was tall, and good-looking, and always the center of attention. If the room didn’t go silent when he walked in, then he always had a way of making it do so, usually by picking on somebody. Usually Zell. So Zell hated Seifer, and Zell hated, by extension, Seifer’s stupid friends. But... 

But now he had a different view of Raijin. 

Not that he'd asked for it. 

When he found Quistis, she was buried in a book. Without thinking, Zell brought the cover down firmly with one hand, making her shriek. Then she straightened and looked at him and said, “Zell? Is Squall—“

Zell shook his head. He wanted to tell her what he’d seen. But his throat was raw, and for once in his life he felt tired, and, most of all, he just couldn’t form words.

“What happened?” Quistis said, taking him in.

Zell put a hand to his throat, like this was going to make him speak better. It didn’t, but the gesture reminded him of Ma, of Ma’s little touches to his forehead whenever he’d had a fever. He’d long outgrown those and would vociferously deny ever having received them if someone ever confronted him about it. But the gesture comforted him. He opened his mouth. He wanted to tell Quistis everything.

It was a very simple story. But a long one -- lives, even short lives like Raijin's, took a while to get going. They could go on and on and on; there were a million moments and a million details you could pack into just eighteen or nineteen years; Zell knew that firsthand now.

The story went: boy is born.

Boy lives.

Boy catches the attention of the wrong people.

Raijin had caught the attention of the wrong people. And Ellone had dropped Zell in Raijin’s mind long enough to let him see the full effects of that. Ellone was funny like that. She could send you back in time. She could trap you where you didn't want to be.

She could make time go on forever, too. In real world terms, how long had he been gone? Quistis looked the same – the same age and everything. Squall, below decks, still trapped himself – looked the same. It couldn’t have been years. It couldn’t have been a whole lifetime. He couldn’t have been – briefly, ever so briefly, yet at the same time for so long – somebody else entirely.

So why had he felt as though he had been? Like he’d lived a lifetime as Raijin?

“Who were you?” Zell asked hoarsely, instead of explaining. He had to know. Ellone had sent him back. She was obviously still sending Squall back. She usually did it in threes; Quistis had to be the only one left. And Zell wanted to know what she’d seen, because he wanted to get to the bottom of this. He wanted to figure out why Ellone was doing this now of all times; she couldn’t want to change the past, not anymore.

Unless she wanted to change Raijin’s past. And Fujin’s. And Seifer Almasy’s. Unless she still thought that could be _done_.

“I—Ellone didn’t take me,” Quistis said hastily. “I don’t know _why_ , honestly. She usually—hey!“

Cursing, Zell seized up her vid phone, lying there next to what looked like a strip of bloody sheet. He didn’t spare a thought for the sheet; he didn’t have time. He just punched in the number, digging it up out of his memory, his painful brain, where it felt like his GFs were clawing to keep it.

They were unsettled too.

Ellone picked up very quickly. Her face filled the screen at first – pale, wide brown eyes, nice-looking in a homey Winhill way. She squinted at the phone as though she was surprised to find Quistis calling her (which she probably was; none of them really kept up a regular correspondence with her except maybe Squall), and seemed less surprised when she saw it was Zell, and then rapidly began to look worried because Zell’s face must have shown his upset.

“Yes?” she said tentatively.

Zell stared at her. It didn’t seem right, all of a sudden, that she should look so kind, so normal. Not with what she could do. Not with what she was willing to do: mess with a person so thoroughly that it was like they weren’t even themselves anymore. They had their identity ripped away. They became people they never wanted to be. How was that right?

“Why’d you do it?” Zell asked her.

“Zell,” Quistis began. His fury must be coming out in his voice. Zell didn’t care if it was.

Ellone looked suddenly very said. She said, very simply, “I thought you'd ask before now. I thought one of you would. I guess I’m surprised it was you, Zell. I know Squall knows—“

“How can you talk about Squall when you’re doing it to him right now?” Zell yelled. He was shaking the phone, because it was _wrong_ , what she was doing. Squall loved her. She might’ve been the only person in the world, besides Rinoa, that Squall loved. And still she used him. She threw him out of his own head and then sat there looking sad and normal when confronted about it. She had no right to look sad and normal. She wasn’t normal, and what she was doing to them wasn’t right.

Zell had been used by plenty of people in his life. He was a mercenary, and that was what being a mercenary was about. But he’d signed up for that. He’d never signed up to let Ellone fling him around time.

“Look,” he said furiously, cutting off whatever Ellone was about to say in her defense. “I get it. Maybe you don’t like that Fujin and Raijin and Seifer Almasy went wrong or whatever—“

“What?” said Ellone.

“What?” said Quistis, for some reason looking very unnerved and clutching her book.

“But you should’ve learned by now that what’s happened happened!" Zell continued savagely. “You can’t mess with time. The last person who did that? We ended her. And I thought _you_ of all people—“

“Zell,” Ellone said, very softly.

“No! Let me finish!” Zell said. Now he’d found his words again, found his sense of self again. Now he wasn’t dumb and off-kilter, halfway between himself and Raijin. Now that he was a little angry, flushed with anger he had to get out somewhere, somehow, if only by yelling at Ellone. Now he was himself. Ellone had been jerking him around, hauling him and Squall through time, leaving them linked to experiences they didn't want, people they shouldn't be expected to sympathize with, suffering tortures that didn't belong to them. She'd struck some hits against them. He was gonna make her feel those hits. He was gonna let her know they’d connected, and that she was responsible for them.

“You want me to help Raijin Dobe,” Zell said, “You call up to Garden, and you can damn well _hire me_.”

“Okay, what?” said Quistis, still out of the loop.

Zell ignored her. “I get it!” he said. “The guy’s in trouble! I hate him, but fine. Fine. I’ll help if I have to. But we’re not gonna do it by undoing his mistakes. You can’t change the past, and you shoulda learned that by now—“

“I did,” Ellone said quickly, looking panicked.

“No, you didn’t!” Zell said. “You threw us back, again, and—“

“To Raijin?” Ellone said, making it sound like a question.

“You know damn right to Raijin!” Zell roared.

He hated that she was so calm about it, that her face was so falsely compassionate, that she seemed more worried than upset that he was yelling at her. He didn’t like falseness; he’d had enough of it to last him more than his eighteen years. And he’d thought that he was through with manipulative and careless people: Matron was up North somewhere, making nice with the Trabians. Cid was down in Centra getting ready to trick the Estharians out of some sinkhole. Seifer Almasy had finally done the only just thing and completely removed himself from everyone’s life.

So the only people left were the good people, the straightforward people, the ones that wouldn’t want to use you or hurt you to achieve their own aims. Or at least that was how it was supposed to go. Right? The two-faced, the secretive liars, the bullies – they lost. And you won: all the good people won. The good people won, passed the SeeD test, made rank A, made the papers, finally got a bite at the hot dog. The bad people? Fuck ‘em.

Only here was Ellone, happy and safe in Esthar, sweet-seeming and reunited with Laguna. But she wasn’t so good, and no matter how sweet she pretended to be, she knew she was capable of some very strange, unsettling, wrong things. And Raijin – Raijin wasn’t so bad. But he’d been fucked over; Zell had seen it. Ellone had shown it to him, in a bid at playing Hyne again, at getting the orphanage gang to fix something she thought was wrong.

And the problem was: she was right. What was happening to Raijin was wrong. It was impossible not to feel bad for the guy: when Zell had left him, he’d been getting _tortured_ , for Hyne’s sake.

“Fine,” Zell said, more than a little bitterly. “Fine. I’ll see what I can do about Raijin. But you wake Squall up. Now. And you’ve gotta promise that you’re never, ever gonna do this to us again.”

“Zell—“ Ellone began.

“I don’t wanna hear excuses! Those are the terms!” Zell said, and hung up the phone. Then, for good measure, he threw it down, strode over to the rail of the ship, and got in three good blows to calm himself down before it splintered. Two White SeeDs came running, shouting.

“Zell!” Quistis said, scandalized.

“Whatever, man. I’m rank A. Take it out of my next paycheck,” he muttered. He turned to go downstairs. Now that he knew that Quistis was fine, that she hadn’t been taken, he wanted to check on Squall. He’d left Squall below-decks, still seemingly trapped in Ellone's dream world. Well. Ellone had heard the terms, and now she knew. She had to wake Squall up, or they weren’t going to get anywhere. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help Raijin – he did. But he wasn’t going to do it on Ellone’s terms. He was going to do it on his.

“Zell,” Quistis said again, coming up before him and blocking his way. She put her hands firmly on his shoulders to keep him from moving past her. Only a former Instructor would ever dare do this; anyone else would have expected a punch to the face, but Quistis knew she had an old blanket of academic authority, and besides this she knew more about him than most people probably did.

“She made you Raijin?” Quistis confirmed, after a minute.

Zell nodded.

“And he’s in trouble?” Quistis said.

Another nod.

“And now you want to help Raijin for some reason?” Quistis said.

Zell opened his mouth to reply but then figured it would take too much time. They had to check on Squall first. He said, “C’mon, man, Squall is—“

“Okay,” Quistis said, relenting. “Okay. I’m worried about you, too, though, you know.” 

He acknowledged this with another nod and she let him lead the way downstairs. Zone and Watts shrank back when they went into the cabin. Squall was unchanged. Zell stared down at him, at their friend, his handsome face frozen, his limbs stiff at his side, his eyes wide open and horrified. It didn’t look like him. It didn’t look right. How could someone do this to Squall? How could someone he loved that much do it to him? 

Zell cursed again. Wary, Zone and Watts edged toward the door.

“I guess she’s not accepting the terms,” Quistis said, her voice very hard. 

Zell had a powerful urge to tear the whole ship apart – and he could, too; he knew he could. Except that he was on the ship, so it would be a bad idea. What was he gonna do after: strap Quistis and Squall to a pair of dolphins and hope they all made it back to Garden in time? 

So instead he just said, suddenly feeling uncharacteristically defeated, “I guess she’s not.” 

There was silence. After a minute, Quistis said, “Maybe we can figure out why, though. Zell, what did you see?”


	13. Chapter 13

Raijin had rarely junctioned, so he'd had a lot of memories. And with those memories came a clear, perfect sense of identity. Rooted in a greater, more detailed past than Zell had ever had.

At first, Zell had felt slightly drunk on it.

Raijin was from Fisherman's Horizon. The junk town. When Zell had discovered this, his first thought had been: did Seifer Almasy even know that his cronies were from there? It seemed wrong, somehow. Not appropriate for the disciplinary committee, who'd always tried to be so aloof and cool. How could anyone cool be from FH? FH made Balamb look like a major city center. FH was plump cats picking through piles of old machinery, weapons taken apart and re-formed into solar panels and fishing poles, children laughing from the innards of an old Estharian tank, now a makeshift playhouse.

Fisherman's Horizon had no use for all the bits and pieces of war.

Or, rather, the people there had too many uses for that stuff. They turned grey submarines into cozy little houses, used codes and relay systems as a PA system to warn each other of any strange characters that might be wandering about. Garden took in everything the sorceress wars had produced and perfected it: orphans became soldiers, Odine's magic system became a standardized curriculum. But in FH magic didn't matter. Magic! What did the residents of FH need magic for, when they had the sun and the surf, a lifetime to spend gazing out over the blue sea, watching the windmills turn lazily, the light reflecting on the water?

And orphans didn't stay orphans in FH. When the engineers that would build FH had left Esthar, they'd gathered up plains refugees, wounded soldiers - anyone who'd needed a home. So Raijin's mother had found her way there and died, and when she'd died no one had batted an eye at raising the kids she left behind. Mayor Dobe took them in gladly and raised them in the house at the center of the glittering solar panel: two kids left to run the whole junk pile however they wanted.

Until Seifer Almasy.

FH had a steady trickle of aimless people coming in all the time: people who'd lost their livelihoods to the Galbadians, people who were wanted for political crimes and feared being sent to the D-District, drifters and army deserters tired of war. Most of them came and stayed. Or else came, went to Esthar, saw nothing but the dried up salt lake, then returned to FH and stayed. FH was a junk pile, but it was a welcoming junk pile. So for a very, very long time, only a few people had ever left Fisherman's Horizon for good after coming to visit. It had only happened twice in the time that Raijin lived there.

The first time it was a man who couldn't have been familiar to Raijin in any way, though he was familiar to Zell. Zell knew that slim form, that loping way of moving, those shrewd dark eyes. He'd come over from the Esthar side. He hadn't come across the bridge; people from Esthar didn't do that. He'd taken an underwater transport, and it had bobbed up in full view, making the residents of FH uneasy, and a skinny, defiant seven-year-old Fujin Dobe had picked up a metal pipe and advanced along the edge of the pier, ready to defend against the intruder, until her adoptive father had come up behind her, made her put the pipe down, and scolded Raijin for letting his sister get so violent.

"Whatever you want," Mayor Dobe had said, addressing the transport, "we're willing to talk about giving it to you. But we don't fight here. We won't even fight Esthar. Esthar's in the past for us, you hear?"

The submarine had been too sleek, too polished, to be from anywhere else. It attached itself gracefully to the pier and raised itself up, and then a pair of gleaming blue doors on the side had slid open. And out had walked Kiros Seagill himself. He'd bowed to Mayor Dobe.

"You're not from Esthar," Mayor Dobe had said, looking him over with surprise.

Kiros had inclined his head. In the memory, young Raijin thought that he really didn't look like he was from the Esthar continent. He looked like those people in old storybooks about Northwest Galbadia, the slim and regal people of the ancient pyramid kingdoms. Raijin had stared up at him, impressed. Fujin, trapped in Mayor Dobe's grip, had bared her teeth. Kiros had looked down at them as though he found this amusing, then reached out a hand and ruffled Fujin's hair. The Mayor had let him do it; they really didn't kid around about not fighting in FH, not even if strange weirdoes showed up to touch their kids, apparently. But in this case the gesture had defused some of the tension. Fujin had been, improbably, a very sweet-looking girl, with two eyes and a pretty jeweled ornament like a bindi beneath the right one, a present from her deceased mother. She was a strange kid – all rough play and imaginary friends and manhandling her brother – but it made sense to want to ruffle her hair. For all that she'd be terrifying later, at that age she'd been ruffle-able.

"Look," Mayor Dobe said tiredly. "We don't plan on going back. Esthar didn't want what we had to offer, didn't want peace. So if you want us to help you fight, if that's what this is about, you'll have to kill us-"

"NO!" Fujin had shouted then.

Kiros had held up hands, pacifying. "I'm not here to kill anyone, or to drag you back. You're right that I'm not originally from Esthar. I'm working with the new president, that's all. I'm his man, not Esthar's. And he didn't want to bother you unless it was absolutely necessary. But I've checked everywhere else."

"Checked for what?" Mayor Dobe had said, leaning back to better adjust his grip on the rebellious, struggling Fujin.

Kiros Seagill had looked down at her and put his hand on her hair again.

"A girl," he'd said. "Children come here, don't they? Lost ones. Lost people. There's only a handful of places that'll take them, and over the years I've checked them all. Dollet, Timber. I've just been down to this old orphanage in Centra we discovered. But no one's seen her. Or so they say." He'd bent down until he and Fujin were looking eye to eye. "The last time I saw her," he said. "She looked like you, a little. But she'd be much bigger now."

"We're not going to deliver a little girl to the Estharian government," said Mayor Dobe. "Seven or eight years ago, they were stealing little girls. So-"

"I know," Kiros had said. "But you're going to stop me if I want to look around for her. You don't fight. But I do."

And so he'd looked around. He had with him a photo of Ellone, faded and wrinkled. No one in FH would tell him if they'd seen her, but neither would they bar him access to their houses, their boats, their fishing nooks. FH was an open book. After a while, Fujin and Raijin had tagged along beside him, against Mayor Dobe's wishes.

"WHY?" Fujin had asked blankly.

"What do you need her for, ya know?" Raijin had asked Kiros. "What's her name?"

"I'll tell you if you can take me to her," Kiros had said easily, looking calmly through the rooms of the FH inn. Neither child could take him to Ellone, so they were never to know it was Ellone he was looking for, and none of the three - of course - could know that Ellone had been placed on the White SeeD ship that very year, or that, not so far away, Cid Kramer was unveiling Balamb Garden, a locus for all the world's lost children. These were things Zell knew, far in the future, and could match against the clear memory in Raijin's head. But the Raijin back then had had no idea, so all he'd done was stare dubiously at the sharp blades in Kiros's belt.

"Look like fins, ya know?" he'd told Kiros. "But sharp."

"You look like a plainsman," Kiros told him. "But small, and safe, and alive."

Raijin had stared up at him. Kiros had said thoughtfully, "I thought you were all dead. I had a friend once who wanted to travel the world: his dearest dream was to meet a plainsman. But by the time he got around to doing it, Batibat Kerr had killed them all. Or so we thought. I guess some ended up here."

"If someone comes and kills us," Fujin had said, startling her brother by suddenly breaking into normal speech, "we won't be able to do anything about it. You could kill us with those fins right now."

Kiros had stared down at her, sympathetic. Something had passed between them that Raijin hadn't been able to understand at the time. Zell, viewing the memory in Raijin's head years later, had recognized it the kinship that could spring up between two born fighters. 

Kiros then said, "It must get lonely around here, thinking like that. I'll bet no one else lets that thought bother them. So you can't say it to anyone: it's a thought you can't communicate. That's a terrible thing. You can't talk to them, so why bother saying a lot at all?"

And that was all Raijin remembered of Kiros Seagill, to him a nameless curiosity. A non-Estharian Estharian, who'd bobbed up one day looking for a girl, and found instead an entirely different girl: a warlike person trapped in FH, blowing angrily from pier to pier like a confined wind spirit. And then years had passed, nearly five of them, before someone else came to FH who could be a kindred spirit for Fujin. But this time he came from the West, and he came walking across the bridge.

He didn't have his coat back then. He was shivering because he'd cast off his cadet's jacket in a fit of temper. And he wasn't alone.

In Raijin's memory, Seifer had been visible a long way off down the length of the bridge, but no one in FH had moved to stop him as he approached. Nor to stop the other figures behind him: a harassed-looking, familiar girl, a few years older than he was, and a round, fatherly man holding Seifer's cadet jacket up with one hand and puffing in his struggle to keep up with the other two.

Cid Kramer had come to FH with two of his cadets in tow and with a very specific objective. The three of them trooped directly into Mayor Dobe's house and sat cross-legged (or, in Xu's case, primly kneeling) on the floor, all surrounded by the Mayor's beeping consoles - repurposed now as miniature solariums, makeshift microwaves, and who-knew-what else. The Mayor hadn't yet married Flo in those days, so he was the only one to greet the newcomers. He looked at them as sternly as he'd looked at Kiros Seagill. He'd told his children to stay out of sight, in case these people didn't respect FH's solemn pacifist principles. The blond boy, after all, carried a blade bigger than his arm. The dark-haired girl caught her skirt on a tangle of wire sticking from the wall and her whip clattered out onto the floor. Mayor Dobe coughed pointedly at it and said, "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

Seifer had openly goggled at this, leaning back and spreading out his legs on the floor as though determined to grow roots and stay fixed right there in response, right on that spot, just to spite Dobe. Xu had looked at the Headmaster with furious appeal in her eyes, as though she couldn't believe Dobe would dare to chuck them out. But Headmaster Cid had only held his arms up appeasingly.

"Please, please," he'd said. "We aren't going to fight you-"

Both Seifer and Xu had looked almost betrayed to hear this.

"-I'm here on a summer trip. An assignment for these two: to keep them busy over the vacation. My students, you know."

"Cadets," Seifer had put in brusquely, spreading out his arms and tilting his chin, posing. Preening, really. As he'd gotten older, he'd grown broader and more imposing and figured out the trick of making this look natural. But back then he'd just been a lanky preteen, so, Zell was delighted to discover, it had just looked a little silly.

Certainly Xu had thought so. She said, "Oh please. A few months ago you were a Junior Classman."

"Children," Cid had said, making them both start. Then he continued addressing Dobe as though he hadn't been interrupted. "Esteemed Mayor," Cid said. "We don't come to fight. Xu knew of this place through a family connection." He looked over at Xu and nodded slightly.

Xu took this as her cue. She said, "My oldest sister's Rellia Arismendi. You know her- she's been here. She travels everywhere. She's the Card Queen. She said you all - all of you used to be Estharian. You may live like this now, but you've all got engineering degrees-"

"So do Asede's people up in Trabia," Dobe said dismissively.

"We spoke to Asede," Cid said. "He said that no one from Odine's lab defected to Trabia. He didn't get along with Odine himself, you know, they were like Drinnaks and Bustamante-" Cid had chuckled at this, as though it were very funny "-and so he has no idea what to do now. You see, we operate out of a place called Garden. You might have heard of it?" At Dobe's blank stare, he shook his head ruefully and said, "Well. Maybe it's for the best that you haven't. But the truth is: the Garden is an old, old structure: a Centra structure, and everyone knows Odine's people knew Centra design better than anyone else.

"Our trouble is: we live in the Garden, but we don't really understand it. And in the past few years we've been trying to improve the place. Xu here: she says the children should have a quad, a place to sit and relax. And a proper training center. We have the space for it. But how do you take a place like Garden -- a shelter, that's what it is -- and turn it into a school?"

This repurposing attitude seemed to touch something in Dobe. Though he still seemed wary of the newcomers, he leaned in thoughtfully and said, "What is the Garden?"

And, deftly, Cid Kramer avoided telling the renowned pacifist that it was a place where he turned children into soldiers. He said instead, "Like I said: it used to be a shelter. One of the great Centra shelters. I've added to it, here and there. I needed classrooms, and places for the children - I look after children; I'm the headmaster of our little school - to sleep, and a kitchen, and I was thinking, oh, maybe now I should give it a paint job, at least. But as I mentioned: really what we need is a kind of miniature jungle for the training center. A place like the real wilderness-"

"That would cost you a nice pile of gil even if it could be done," Dobe had said doubtfully.

"I can pay," Cid had said, no doubt thinking of NORG.

And they'd fallen into discussing logistics. Xu had leaned in to hear more of the conversation, fascinated. But Seifer had turned his head to the side and surveyed his surroundings, evidently bored. In the memory, Raijin assumed he was bored. But there was also a layer of knowledge Raijin had added to the memory over time, the knowledge of what made Seifer tic, and so he recalled not someone exasperated with a dull adult conversation as much as someone who was paying attention - but with only half of himself. The other half of Seifer was studying Mayor Dobe's sunlit, airy, cluttered room. Looking for something. On a mission of his own.

His eyes lit on two figures half-hidden in the stairwell, listening where their father wouldn't be able to spot them.

Fujin. Raijin.

Seifer drew in his legs and pulled himself into a crouch, being uncharacteristically unobtrusive about it for him, then slipped across the room to greet them. Xu didn't notice. She was arguing the finer points of quad design with Mayor Dobe: how many trees did a person need to see, really? And who cared if the space wasn't ideal for peaceful meditation? Who wanted to meditate? She never meditated.

Cid did notice. And he did something odd in that moment: he put up a hand like he wanted to stop Seifer, and then thought better of it. He let him go. Seifer crossed to the darkened stairs and, shooting Fujin and Raijin a cool look, jumped down the steps to the interior of the house, then out the front door, then sauntered backwards along the platform that bordered the mayor's house so that they could see him clearly through the open door. At the edge of the platform he took out his gunblade and used it to wave lazy circles in the air.

A taunt for the two small pacifists, who'd never be allowed any weapons of their own. Fujin had tensed up next to her brother, full of rage. Before Raijin could stop her she was off down the steps, ready to confront Seifer, giving him one hard shove so that he toppled - laughing, because of course he was laughing; Zell couldn't ever remember a Seifer who didn't delight in provoking people - off the platform and onto the solar panel. Fujin gave a shout of rage and jumped down after him, like she'd been looking for an excuse to pummel someone for years. Which, of course, she had.

But when Raijin caught up to them outside there was very little pummeling going on. Seifer stood swinging his blade aimlessly in the center of a blue panel, the light reflecting from it making his hair gleam. He seemed very cheerful at having prodded Fujin into rage. He said, "You a plains girl?" with no small amount of interest.

He'd thought, he explained, that they were all dead: the plains people. And Fujin hadn't looked like a plains girl when he'd seen her from far off - albino, was she? Weird. Well, he'd made Cid bring him along because there were supposed to be plains people here; the Card Queen had said so, and the Card Queen knew everybody and had done everything: she'd even played a sorceress in a movie once.

"I'll bet you hate sorceresses," Seifer had said, pointing a finger at Fujin defiantly.

Raijin, coming up behind her, had said, "Well, we don't exactly like 'em, ya know?"

Hate wasn't really encouraged in FH. But it was a sorceress - Adel - who had destroyed Fujin and Raijin's people. A sorceress and her Knight.

"You're definitely from the plains," was all Seifer had said, staring at Raijin approvingly. Seifer was tall for his age, but Raijin was taller, and Seifer, instead of being fazed by this, appeared to find this fitting, entirely correct. He'd wanted a massive dark tribesman of old, and now he'd found one. Seifer liked it when the world met his romantic expectations.

So he sat down there in the middle of the path, easy and at home, and balanced his blade on his knee. Fujin and Raijin blinked down at him, befuddled.

"Whaddya know about the Knight Kazamai?" Seifer asked them, without preamble. "I've been everywhere asking about her - about all of them, really, but she's the one nobody can tell me about. Cid let me go off on my own for the summer for the first time last year, and I hitched all the way to Deling. But nobody there knows anything about her. Nobody in the West knows anything about her, period. She was from the plains, ya know."

"We...know?" Raijin said, confused to be confronted by a gunblade-wielding ancient history enthusiast, and even more confused to be on the receiving end of a 'ya know.'

"She served Wren Seervayne," Seifer continued, as though he hadn't spoken. "The sorceress. Sorcerer, really, but you know the convention. They're all sorceresses; the only one we call 'him' is Hyne. Oh-" he added, at Fujin and Raijin's continued stares, "I'm not religious. What's the point, anyway? People thinking Hyne'll come back to punish us all in the end for turning away from him, developing our own minds. But I just-- I like Knights, that's all. I collect 'em."

"'EM?" repeated Fujin, crossing her arms skeptically. She seemed annoyed. She'd been glad for an excuse to tackle Seifer. But now that she was standing next to him it was clear that he'd maybe let himself be tackled, in order to have a reason to talk to her. Seifer, of course, couldn't initiate conversation like a normal person. He had to do it in the most attention-seeking, bullying way possible.

"Knights," Seifer said again, like he thought Fujin was a little slow. "People don't like 'em much. Well, I do. Not Kerr, though," he added hastily, bringing his hands up. "Actually Wardegrave's my favorite. You know Wardegrave?"

Fujin gave a huff of annoyance in response. But Raijin felt a little bad for Seifer. Raijin was a good kid, a conscientious kid, a true FH fisherkid at heart. And something in him understood then that this lean blond boy, his cheeks oddly hollowed, his demeanor making him seem bigger than he was, seemed to be trying to be impressive. And for the most part he was succeeding, since it wasn't difficult to be more impressive than an FH resident. The national costume of FH was tatty shorts and secondhand waterproof boots.

He didn't wait for them to tell him that of course they knew Wardegrave (everybody knew Wardegrave; that was the first-ever Knight, duh; even Zell knew Wardegrave). Instead he launched into a description of the work some historians had been doing at Deling City University to try and figure out Wardegrave's fighting style; did they know? There had been excavations done, oh, some fifteen years ago now, and they'd dug up all these skeletons from the earth: stocky, powerful skeletons that had to be Ancient Centran. And they'd been able to look at the bones and at old frescoes and vases and things and they'd figured out how these guys must've held their blades-

"Like this," Seifer had demonstrated then, arranging himself purposefully into the stance that Zell, years later, would think of as uniquely his. But it wasn't uniquely his, apparently, and anyway back then he didn't manage to hit it with the kind of grace he'd have later on. He looked more determined than imposing.

But then Fujin and Raijin had never known someone their age to look even close to imposing. They'd never known anyone to have a signature fighting stance, or at least not anyone who wasn't automatically classified as a threat to their peaceful home: a source of fear for Raijin and hopeless, impotent anger for Fujin. But Seifer, who would later loom as one of the greatest threats Zell had ever known, then inspired none of that. The more he talked, demonstrated poses he'd excavated from old books and studies, outlined fantastic stories...

"Now, the sorceress Eeya, she'd take people's heads. Girls' heads, I mean. She'd keep all the heads all locked up in her base and then swap 'em out for her own, and when she'd put on a new one she'd get their memories, their powers, their way of thinking. Well, it's a metaphor, but I think-"

...the more it became clear that he really just wanted to talk to somebody about this stuff.

 _He's lonely_ , Raijin had thought then.

And, horribly, Zell had to concur. He didn't want to concur. Who wanted to feel bad for Seifer Almasy? Seifer was an asshole, and even if he hadn't been the worst kid in the world, that hadn't stopped him from turning into a truly shitty adult. But Zell had always looked up at him from far below. In his worst memories, Seifer was already established at Garden and in the DC, too cool for his cadet uniform, sneering down at junior classman Zell for some minor infraction. And in Zell's hazy childhood dreams, Seifer was the orphanage kid who was too big to consider Zell anything but an annoyance, the secret orchestrator of all those midnight bonfires that Zell never got invited to.

But in Raijin's memories he was just a passionate, weird kid. Who talked about Knights like he was afraid that if he stopped, then he'd lose people's attention and then they wouldn't want to listen to him at all.

"KAZAMAI," Fujin said, interjecting then.

"-what?" Seifer said, annoyed. He pointed his blade at Fujin, clearly more for show than anything else, since if he was going to attack them he could have done it at any point. He said, "Listen, don't interrupt me. I don't like it when people talk over me," with a healthy trace of the arrogance that would someday dominate his entire personality. Zell was weirdly glad to see it; it reminded him that he didn't actually like Seifer, not even this tempered, embryonic Seifer that would have meaning for Raijin somewhere in the future.

But, in the past, not yet meaning for Fujin. Weird. Fujin had always been Seifer's biggest fan. But now she tapped her foot in irritation like she thought she could bully Seifer of all people into shutting up and said again, "KAZAMAI."

"You wanted to know about her, ya know?" Raijin said, because he was used to translating for Fujin. "Fujin wants you to get to the point."

Seifer scowled. "The point is that nobody records these people right. Knights, I mean. Even Wardegrave -- people say he had a second Knight serving next to him. But no one tells you who or why. But they -- they were big, the Knights. Fighters. And people are so scared of 'em they'd just rather forget what made 'em great," he complained. "Especially if they aren't from Galbadia or Dollet. I mean if they can't be used like puppets to show why Vinzer Deling's a good ruler. But they shouldn't be used that way; they're not puppets. They're the only people to really think for themselves. They're not afraid of magic, even if everybody else is."

This was certainly true, but Raijin (and Zell) privately thought that people had good reason to be afraid of magic. Magic - sorceress magic, anyway - rarely brought anybody anything good. Even Kazamai had been-

"KILLED," Fujin said dismissively.

"Sooner or later, Knights get killed," Raijin said. "Kinda weird that you like 'em so much, ya know? Sooner or later they just end up dyin'."

But Seifer had just sheathed his blade, folded his arms around himself, and done something Zell had seen him do often: he'd laughed. More than a little derisively, too. The classic Seifer Almasy laugh: private and public at the same time; private because it seemed to say he knew something you didn't, public because he wanted to make sure you were aware of that.

"Sooner or later," Seifer said, stretching out his hands grandiosely, "Everyone ends up dying. But me? I wanna do something big before I go. Something everybody's gonna have to pay attention to. I-" and here he brought up one thumb and jerked it back to point at himself, theatrical. "-I'm gonna be a Knight."

 _Yeah, tell us about it, you psycho,_ Zell thought, glad to finally get to the crux of him. This was Seifer Almasy. This guy. This horrible, arrogant, crazy-

"DEAL," Fujin said in response.

 _-deal?_ Zell thought, confused.

"Fujin wants to make a deal with you, ya know?" Raijin translated.

"I got that; I'm not a moron," Seifer said dismissively. "Alright. What is it? And why?"

Fujin held up a hand to stall him, then turned and shoved her brother back to the platform to confer. Raijin accepted this. She'd always been the stronger-willed of the two, and he accepted most of what she threw at him. Besides, he understood her. Fujin was, deep down, a very frightened person. It was FH that had done it to her. Safe, easygoing FH was a nice place to live in. People cared about them here. People treated them well.

But Fujin thought it came with an expiration date. Everything did. Everything died. And, to go by what had happened to the plains, to the father they'd never known, to their people, sometimes they died in horrible ways, sometimes they were killed off. FH's pacifist principles weren't enough to make up for this awful truth. In fact, sometimes Fujin seemed to forget them entirely. Dobe would lecture her, and the lecture would enter her mind and leave it soon after; she'd blink blankly at her brother like he was a moron whenever he would try to bring it up, to remind her that in FH they lived non-violently.

She thought that was stupid. In other places, people could fight back. In Timber they were fighting back - everyone there was reported to be part of a rebel faction, and no matter how many people Vinzer Deling threw in prison, there were always others willing to organize and strategize in their place. In Dollet, the descendants of the old Nah had their own warlike customs, their own ways of resisting Galbadian supremacy. Even Balamb had its fighters, grizzled old men who'd once fought in the Adel War and who'd retired their guns but still championed town militias, demanded that the young people learn to defend themselves.

 _Yeah. My granddad was like that. He taught me that. You've gotta anticipate the worst. Learn to fight. Not to hurt people. But because you can't be defenseless in life. And because you're gonna find sometimes that there are things worth defending,_ Zell thought, finding strange common ground with Fujin of all people.

"He'll teach us to fight," Fujin told her brother in a low voice. "Look at him. He's not gonna listen to Dobe. And if his teacher is giving us work then he might be here for a while."

Raijin stared at her. Over her shoulder, Seifer Almasy stood, squinting at them in the sunlight and swinging his blade. Behind Seifer was the large shining inverted dome of the panel, the junk tracks of the city, the master fisherman at his post, a whole glittering blue sea of peaceful living.

"He'll teach you, ya know?" Raijin corrected. "I'm gonna be a fisherman. The master fisherman said it's—"

"UNLIKELY," commented Fujin.

"Yeah, but not impossible," said Raijin. "He didn't say impossible; he just said unlikely. I mean, I'm not the best, but I choose to keep up hope, ya know?"

Fujin scowled and shoved him. He stumbled, more to absorb the hit than because it hurt, and let her stalk back to Seifer, confer with him. However she put the deal to Seifer, it made him grin. He laughed again and started sketching something strangely in the air with his blade. When Raijin made it back to them this turned out to be the terms of the deal: highly specific terms, which Fujin hadn't asked for.

"One, finding your weapons. Shouldn't be hard. He can just pick up a stick and hit things, really. He's huge—"

"I don't want to hit things," Raijin protested.

"Quiet," said Seifer.

"QUIET," said Fujin.

"And in exchange you have to tell me what you know about Kazamai's weapons. That's fair. Two. You'll need to start with the basic training manuals. Everybody does. Not the rules like no drill practice in the cafeteria, obviously, that doesn't apply. But—"

And he was again off, outlining what sounded like a four-year training plan for the pair of them: Seifer Almasy's patented fighting lessons, although naturally most of what he said wasn't his at all: it was just everything he'd learned from Cid. He'd now pass it on for the chance to learn more about one of his idols. Zell reflected that it must have seemed like a good trade to him. Cid had always liked Seifer just fine, maybe even liked him a little more than he did some of the other cadets. And Seifer had always seemed to get on fine with Cid, to defer to him a little more easily than he did to other people. But the Seifer of the future had proven that he held no real loyalty to Garden, so obviously it meant nothing to just reveal all the training maneuvers, easily let slip how one could build any weapon, from a simple gun to even a complex chakram blade - he liked that one; he liked the complex ones - or in fact anything at all, with the right equipment.

In the past, as in Zell's present, Seifer was willing to toss away all that Garden had given him, if it meant getting back some slip of Knighthood. Which was nothing. A bunch of old stories. Some long-dead bullies. That was all.

 _…You are so fucking weird,_ Zell thought.

And initially Fujin and Raijin had felt the same. Seifer was weird. He had a perfectly serviceable guardian, one who allowed him to fight and everything. But he chose to ignore that guardian, even though Cid seemed very nice to Fujin and Raijin, and very invested in Seifer. Seifer had been brought along on Cid's little excursion presumably to interest him in the running of Garden. He, Cid, and Xu stayed at the hotel, and every morning Cid tried to get him to come talk to the engineers, play nice with Mayor Dobe, learn about how to maneuver the Garden.

"It's said that once the Garden was able to fly!" said Cid.

And Xu said, "If it ever flies again, we'll need a pilot. I can be a pilot. I can do that. The piloting, I mean."

And Seifer said, "Huh."

Cid seemed to be grooming Seifer. He puffed along next to Seifer and discussed, loftily, what it was to be Headmaster, and how it meant you had to meet all kinds, lead all kinds, talk to people, learn what to give and when and where ("I'm taking notes on this!" said Xu, a pen in one hand and a pad in the other, and was largely ignored), and sometimes even make a below-the-table deal or two.

But the only deal Seifer was interested in was the one that would bring him closer to his dream. Invariably he would slip away, leaving Cid looking after him, an unreadable expression on his face. And then Seifer would head with Fujin and Raijin to one of the more deserted spots of FH – to the abandoned train cars outside the mayor's house, or to the creepy, graffitied train depot. He would put them through their paces there, where the residents of FH were less likely to see. And all the while he would talk.

"Look, I'm not saying they were all exciting," he'd say, lying back on the abandoned tracks with his arms crossed behind his head, while Fujin and Raijin sparred, sweating their way through all thirty-three Garden-approved defensive stances in the hot sun. "Vasko Phipps literally became a Knight by accident. He was really the on-site doctor on the trans-oceanic – the trans-oceanic was the train that used to run along this rail, from Timber to Esthar-"

"We know it was, ya know?" Raijin said, panting with exertion.

"LIVE ON IT," said Fujin, annoyed.

Seifer waved a hand lazily at them and kept talking. "But Torval Vertigris was something. Not nice, but something. He collected eyes. Would've liked yours—" he pointed at Fujin here. She still had both eyes, and they were nice enough, with her bright bindi making their color seem less strange. "—red. Unusual. I think Xu's jealous. She was gettin' all soppy with Cid about how cute you are and how nice this place is—" he rolled his eyes. "Anyway. Vertigris. Since he was raised by Tonberries—"

 _That's ridiculous. They would have knifed him,_ Zell thought.

"RIDICULOUS," said Fujin.

"They woulda knifed him, ya know?" said Raijin.

Seifer raised himself up on his elbows and stared at them. He didn't say anything for a minute, but then his face took on a scornful look and he said, "You're as bad as Xu. Well, I've got no time for people who only see what's obvious to them. I want dreamers. Believers. Like me."

Then he stood up and strode off, hauling himself onto the abandoned train platform and walking out of sight. Fujin and Raijin stopped and watched him go.

"So he only makes friends with nutcases, ya know?" Raijin said, after a minute, when he thought Seifer must be out of earshot. "Knight-obsessed nutcases."

Fujin laughed and nodded. "SO NO ONE," she said.

"Yeah, I bet he hasn't got anybody, ya know?" Raijin said. And they went back to sparring.

But when Seifer didn't come back after a few more minutes, Fujin raised an eyebrow at Raijin and went to the edge of the platform. He followed. They peered over it. Seifer was a little ways off, examining a draw point.

FH had quite a few draw points, like everywhere else did. No one ever used them. Magic wasn't something they needed, and so these strange natural wonders, cropping up even in the heart of the technological junk pile, went largely ignored. But Seifer crouched in front of this one, entranced by the play of light, and when they came close he said, "Now, if you wanna fight for real, this is what you need." He spread out an arm grandiosely as he said it. But his voice wasn't in it. There was something a little bitter to it. Fujin and Raijin said nothing, unsure how to react. Seifer always seemed to want to convince them that he had a dangerous, mercurial bent, with his gunblade-waving, his barks of sudden laughter. But he'd never really been convincing until now, because generally there was no bitterness in him.

 _Yet,_ Zell thought, with sudden clarity. _Not yet. That's—that's what makes this one so different. The Seifer I know… He's got more rot in him than this one._

"I do have a friend, by the way," Seifer told them coolly.

Fujin and Raijin looked at each other, caught out.

"His name is Squall, and he's littler than you, and he could still wipe the floor with both of you," Seifer said.

It was a taunt. It made Fujin flush and look angry. But Raijin only felt guilty, for being cruel about him, and also a little embarrassed, because he assumed Seifer was lying.

 _He's not,_ Zell thought. _Or at least he's not lying about Squall existing, or being able to take you both on. But calling Squall a friend?_

It wasn't that it was impossible. Zell realized that it was absolutely possible. From what he could recall of the Orphanage, Seifer had liked Squall more than he'd ever liked him, at least. Seifer and Squall had fought, sure, but only because Seifer fought with everyone. And those fights had never been as heated, intense, or cruel as they later became. Maybe he and Squall had been friends once.

It was just a weird thought to contemplate.

"SQUALL?" Fujin asked skeptically.

"Yeah," Seifer said, turning away from her dismissively and sitting down to continue studying the draw point. "I wanted to bring him along, but Cid said no. Cid wants him to work through the summer. He's gotta get stronger, Cid says. He's not strong enough."

"SAID OTHERWISE."

"You said he could take us, ya know?"

"He can!" Seifer said defensively. "He's still a Junior Classman, but only because he scored two points less than me on the Spring exam, which was still the third-best score. But Cid says it's no good – one high score's fine for me, but—" He shifted uncomfortably. "Squall's different. Cid's already started him on GFs. Squall can draw and everything."

He said this last bit matter-of-factly, not enviously, which was strange. Zell would have expected him to be envious. Seifer hated being behind at things, hated being judged less than people: you could see it in him. He would nod, clap, give you your due. But there would be a brittle quality to him when he next spoke to you, a sign that he might break off mid-congratulations and start making fun of you instead, making it impossible for you to enjoy your victory.

But now he spoke tonelessly. He said, "Cid wants me to be Headmaster some day. But he's got other plans for Squall."

Fujin and Raijin looked at eachother. The bit about Cid wanting him to be Headmaster certainly sounded true enough. Maybe the stuff about Squall wasn't just a desperate attempt to stave off embarrassment. Gingerly, they both came closer to Seifer, Fujin looking a tiny bit sorry, Raijin feeling more apologetic than ever. Seifer ignored them.

He kept speaking. "He won't tell me what his plans are, but I know he has 'em. He treats Squall like—like Squall's gonna vanish someday, maybe, and not come back, like there's somethin' waiting to get him and nothing Squall does can prepare him enough for it. It's makin' Squall weird. Some days he trains and trains and comes back and acts like he doesn't even _know_ …"

He trailed off. Fujin and Raijin looked at each other, at a loss for what to do. Raijin again considered that Squall might be imaginary, and wondered if maybe Seifer had dreamed Squall up. Maybe he was really telling them about his own life. Maybe he was the one who had to train and train, and maybe he was resentful about that. Even though, really, Cid Kramer seemed like such a nice man.

"Cid seems to like you, though, ya know?" Raijin put in gently.

Seifer gave him a withering look. "Cid likes me," he said flatly, "Because Cid thinks he's gonna keep me. He's thought that for a while. That he'll lose Squall, but me he can keep. I can stay at Garden and build his dream. But I'm not going to!"

He stood and did something completely perplexing. He jabbed out a hand at the draw point – very dangerous, since sometimes they could burn very hot or go icy cold, with dire results to the person touching them every time – and let the purple light wash over his arm. When he brought it back he seemed almost disappointed to find that the arm was still whole. He said, in a savage rush, "Here's what people are like at Garden. I mean the SeeDs. They're boring. They're not moral. They're just conventional. They're not loyal. They're just dutiful. They're not courageous. They just followers. They're not imaginative. They're just superstitious. They're not _just_. They're just well-decorated.

"Cid doesn't want them to be anything else," he finished, and his voice broke off, a little, and Raijin had the strange thought that maybe Seifer, like Fujin, didn't like where he was from very much.

Evidently Fujin thought the same. She sat next to him, cross-legged, like she was planning on settling in, and she said, apropos of nothing, "THANK YOU."

For what? Sharing something with them? Making up a friend named Squall? Raijin, for all that he had the bigger heart and was probably fonder of Seifer than Fujin was, was a little more dubious about sitting down next to Seifer so easily when he was behaving so unpredictably. But he followed Fujin's lead after a moment and sat down, too. There was silence. The silence bothered Raijin; he wasn't sure where they could go from here.

"So. Squall, ya know? Sounds like you're concerned about him, ya know?"

Seifer looked at him directly as though about to confirm this, but then changed his mind and shrugged. "He's started forgetting stuff. We grew up together. I remember; he forgets. It doesn't make sense. He's younger than me, though. It could be normal."

"Yeah, yeah," said Raijin agreeably. "Well, Fujin's younger than me too, ya know? And she forgets stuff all the time. Like when our dad talks about living without fighti—mmmfgh!"

Fujin had smacked him in the head.

"Well, you _do_ forget, ya know?" Raijin protested, as Seifer doubled over with laughter. "I mean, it's not your fault, ya know? You're forgetful. And it's not like you don't know it. Remember how you swore you had a friend only you could hear that was takin' all Dobe's lectures out of your head? That was weird, ya know?"

"RAGE," said Fujin, and moved in for the kill again. But by now Seifer had recovered and he caught her arm. Raijin shot him a grateful look.

"I don't think it's the same," Seifer said pensively. "It could be because he's young. But I've got a theory about it, too. It didn't start until he—"

Seifer stopped, staring at Fujin. He reached out one slim finger and did something odd. He poked at the ornament just below her right eye. Fujin, dumbfounded, didn't think to attack him right away. Then she recovered.

"RUDE!" she said, and launched herself at Seifer. This time Raijin did the intercepting.

But Seifer did something Zell had never seen him do. He held up his hands, palms forward. Surrender.

"Can I see it? Your bindi-thing?" he said, as though he hadn't just very literally prodded Fujin into fury. Fujin's turn to give a withering look.

"NO," she said.

"I'm not gonna keep it," Seifer said. "I just wanna see it. You can—" he grimaced, as though he didn't want to say any more, but felt he had to, "—you can hold my gunblade while I look it over. We'll trade. You don't have to give it back until I give you back what's yours."

Fujin looked at him mistrustfully. But Hyperion gleamed at his side, enticingly sharp and dangerous and completely unlike anything she'd ever touched before. Raijin knew before she said yes that she'd agree, and watched over the trade somewhat warily, as Fujin took the sharp object with no small amount of glee and Seifer examined the bright multicolored jewel.

"It's called Hyperion," Seifer muttered, turning Fujin's ornament over in his hands. "After the poem. You know, the one about Wardegrave. 'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave.' 'By the bright Hyperion, his flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels.'"

Fujin, for her part, delightedly tried a few experimental swings of the blade, leaving her brother jumping back and wincing, worrying she'd cut herself.

"NAME IS—" she began, presumably about to compliment Seifer on selecting such a poetic title for his blade, now that she and Seifer's topsy-turvy love-hate relationship was momentarily back to love.

"It's alright," Seifer said perplexingly. "You don't need to tell me. I can ask it myself."

Fujin stopped swinging and stared at him, confused. Raijin stopped dodging the gunblade and did the same. Neither of them knew what he was talking about.

Zell did. It came to him as Seifer lifted the ornament to his face, apparently decided that he would look ridiculous with a gemstone beneath his eye, and simply settled for holding it tightly in his palm. He closed his eyes for a moment, as though he were focusing hard on something, exerting his will.

Will. Proximity and will. That was all it took.

 _It's a GF Manifest,_ Zell realized.

And Seifer, grinning, confirmed it. Having junctioned, he reached out his hand to the draw point again, ignoring Raijin's warning shout, and whispered a command. The purple light streamed out into blueish-white, and his face glowed momentarily. He took on the new magic. When he opened his eyes again, he looked satisfied.

"Pandemona," he said, handing the ornament back to Fujin. "That's her name, right? Your GF?"

Fujin and Raijin stared at him. He used their momentary surprise to take his gunblade back easily.

"GF?" Fujin said dumbly.

"What are you talking about, ya know?" Raijin asked. "That's not a—Pandemona was her imaginary friend, ya know? But she's not real. She's not a—a—"

"GF!" Fujin said, holding her ornament in front of her like it was going to bite her.

"You didn't know?" Seifer said. "Well. Now you know. You've had power at your fingertips this whole time. You can draw. And cast. You know that, right? You shouldn't tell anybody you can do it, though. Somebody might take it from you and hurt you over it. Even Cid's real weird about GFs. We're supposed to bring all the ones we find to him. So keep it a secret when you're not around me or your brother. But you should start using her. She'll make you stronger. You just need to junction. I'll teach you how."

And then he did. And Raijin thought that maybe he would demand extra for it, would refuse to help Fujin learn unless she told him a million new tales about Kazamai (which would be a problem, because he and Fujin only remembered about three, and had by now begun making things up in order to fulfill their end of the deal), but Seifer didn't do that. Instead he devoted the next week and half to going over junctioning with them, without asking for anything more than the deal's original terms, and so after a while they began, in spite of themselves, to like him.

He kept a lookout at all the town's draw points while Fujin happily drew new magic, and thuggishly bullied away the locals if he had to. He started actually sparring with the Dobe siblings – it was fairer now, he said, since they could junction the GF to hold him off. And he started to tell his Knight stories _to_ them instead of _at_ them. It was no longer an impassioned recitation that didn't account for his audience. Now he actually seemed to care if they were interested or not, and began to cater to their interests, expounding on the great warrior Jana Ki for Fujin, the loyal Tenoch Yahuitl for Raijin. His obsession was still weird, but now it was less something he was using purely to define himself, and more a genuine interest he wanted to share.

So, while Cid and Mayor Dobe and Xu made plans for Garden, and the pacifist engineers traveled in shifts to Balamb town to – perversely – add the finishing touches to the greatest military school the world had ever known, the not-yet-Disciplinary Committee got to know each other, laughing and sparring in the hidden corners of the junk pile.

But one day Xu found them.

It wasn't the sparring that bothered her. She walked right past Fujin and Seifer mid-fight. Fujin spared a glance at her and then nodded at Seifer to show that she understood, someone else was here, no magic could be cast. In response, Seifer eased up on his attacks and began to just bat at her, really, light taps. Raijin, sitting watching them from the train platform, thought it looked strange. He'd grown used to seeing them both in a very graceful light: Fujin standing ramrod straight, at attention, casting powerful spells; Seifer in his pose cribbed from Wardegrave, somehow making it his own.

Xu nodded at Raijin as she passed. Raijin nodded back. Then he put her out of his mind right away; he found her nice enough, if somewhat intense.

There was a sharp inhalation of breath behind him. Raijin turned around. Xu was examining the platform's draw point.

It gave off blue-white light. Fujin had drawn from it this morning. Xu said, very calmly, and in a low voice, "I didn't take the magic from this today."

Raijin felt uneasy. He looked over at Seifer and his sister, still sparring. He slid noiselessly to the train tracks below in order to go warn them. He shouldn't have. There was no point.

"Seifer!" Xu shouted.

Seifer stopped sparring. He shouldered his blade and looked over at Xu, vaguely annoyed.

"What?" he said.

"You little cheat!" said Xu.

Seifer looked perplexed. So did Fujin. Raijin, standing in the shadow of the platform where Xu couldn't see him, waved his hands in a panic and mouthed, _It's white. The draw point's white. She knows._

Fujin stared at him, befuddled. But Seifer got it. He ran to the platform and pulled himself up to face Xu.

"You absolute liar!" Xu said. "You drew from this, didn't you?"

Fujin opened her mouth to protest. Before she could, Seifer shrugged and said, "Maybe I did. So what?"

Xu stared at him, coolly assessing. "So you're in violation. Cid hasn't cleared you for GFs yet. And you've spent all this time pretending you didn't want one. I thought it was suspicious. Now I know why. You weren't supposed to take the Spring exam with a GF—"

"I didn't," Seifer said quickly.

"Oh, please," Xu said. "You scored two points above everyone else in your group, cadets and Junior Classmen alike. That's not normal. Those exams are gamed. Everyone in the same cohort is supposed to get the same score; Cid's designed them that way."

"Trepe got one point below me," Seifer said.

"Yes, but she's a blue mage!" said Xu. "You—you're using a GF behind Garden's back-"

"So snitch on me and go away," Seifer snapped. "You found me out. Fine. But I'm busy right now. I'm not gonna fight with you about it."

"I'm not going until you give me that GF," Xu said.

Seifer shifted uncomfortably. He didn't have the GF; Fujin did. So he just shrugged again, then held out his arms and said, loudly, "No."

Xu reached for her belt and snapped open her whip. "I'll take it if you don't give it to me!"

"You haven't even learned how to draw one yet," Seifer scoffed. "The technique's different, and it's above your level. You've gotta have the magical experience to teleport the Manifest, and nobody in _your_ cohort has any idea how to do that. Not even teacher's pets like you."

To her credit, Xu didn't even dignify that with a verbal response. She just attacked him. They moved very quickly, far more quickly than Seifer moved when he sparred with Fujin, just a whirl of metal and leather on the platform, Seifer supplementing his attacks with some kind of chi, and Xu hers with liberal use of magic. Xu soon had the upper hand; Seifer could singe her, but she could poison him, and it became clear soon enough that her methods were more effective. Fujin, still on the tracks, gave a cry and came running up. Before Raijin could stop her, she'd vaulted up to the platform and joined the fray.

"What are you—" Seifer said, nearly failing to block one of Xu's attacks as he caught sight of Fujin. "No! Go away. She's junctioning right now. She has a GF with her, and that GF can sense—"

It could sense magic. It could sense its fellows. And sense it did. Xu turned her attention to Fujin and said, a second later, " _You_ have the GF."

She backed off of Seifer at once, and left him panting on the platform, patting himself down for an antidote. Raijin, worried for him, climbed up to the platform himself and helped him look. When it seemed he didn't have an antidote, Raijin began liberally dousing him with his potion store, just to stave off his imminent collapse. Seifer seemed annoyed by this waste of potions, but submitted to it.

"Give it to me," Xu told Fujin.

"NO," Fujin scoffed. "MINE."

""It's not yours; it's not anybody's," said Xu. "GFs are for the taking."

"It's hers, Xu," Seifer called out, still looking for an antidote. "Leave her alone."

"You should have taken it from her and given it to Cid," said Xu. "Those are our orders. Those are everybody's orders."

"I don't like those orders!" Seifer said.

"Well, too bad for you," said Xu coolly. "Because we don't get to pick and choose."

And she held out her hand to Fujin and repeated, "Give. It. To. Me."

And Fujin said, very calmly, "No. It's. Mine."

Xu flushed. She said, "I don't want to do this, but you don't leave me any choice," and attacked again. She didn't pummel Fujin with spells, though. She didn't want to beat Fujin, the way she'd wanted to with Seifer. She just wanted the GF. So she took it. But she didn't do what Seifer had said she would; she didn't draw it. She was too young; she didn't know how. Instead she just took the Manifest, leveling her whip at Fujin's right eye and ripping it all – the skin, the lashes, the jeweled ornament – clear away.

Raijin watched, horrified. It happened all at once, and yet almost too slowly for all that. His sister gave a horrified shriek, blood arced up from her face, and Xu, looking a little shocked at the effects of what she'd just done, darted forward and grabbed the bloody gem, then darted back to where Seifer was and hissed, "Give me a potion." Raijin pushed past her savagely and ran to Fujin. She was on the floor. The right side of her face was covered in blood. Raijin moaned in horror to see it. Fujin didn't make any noise at all.

Behind him he heard Xu say again, frantically this time, sounding scared, "Give me a potion! I don't have any cure spells. So give me a potion. She has to have a potion right now, or she'll lose the eye!"

And Seifer said, after a horrible moment of silence, "I don't have any potions anymore. I used them all because you poisoned me."

Somehow, the rest of that day was gone from Raijin's memory. Maybe it had been too traumatic. Maybe he'd given it away in a rare moment when he'd junctioned, not wanting to keep it. Or maybe he'd just passed out from horror. Either way, his life blacked out right then, abruptly stopped short with the vision of his sister covered in blood, and the next thing he and Zell both knew, he was opening his eyes on his cot in the Mayor's House, and his sister was sitting above him. She was free of blood, grim-faced, and one-eyed.

Upstairs, in the sun room, Cid Kramer and Mayor Dobe were arguing loud enough for them to hear.

"You want us to reward you for maiming a child!" Dobe roared.

"They're all children; they don't know any better," Cid said.

"Which is all the more reason for them not to fight!" Dobe said.

"Oh, please," said Cid. "You've helped us build Garden now; you can't tell me that you're so squeamish about our aims—"

"Helped you with the express agreement that if we did so, you and your people would never bring violence to Fisherman's Horizon!"

"And now I want to take violence away!" Cid said. "I'm not taking the GF because I want to punish her! It's brought you nothing but pain, and it's made to hurt people. So let us have it. If we have it, it really can never be used against you again."

There was a moment's silence. Raijin looked at his sister. She looked even paler than usual. She looked horrible.

"Fine," Mayor Dobe said, in a tight voice.

"Good," came Cid's voice, laced with relief. "Now about the plans to build below B-Level. I think—"

"We won't be doing any more building for you," said Mayor Dobe. "Get the hell out of my house."

Cid protested loudly. Mayor Dobe remained firm. Their tones crept up, up, up again, harsher and angrier than ever.

"Fujin," Raijin whispered, not caring about the fight, only caring about his sister. "Fuu, they're taking—"

"He was right," Fujin said slowly. "He said they would take it and try to hurt me. GFs are…they're like anything else. If you have something: a GF, a peaceful life, a good life. It doesn't matter. You have to be able to defend it. Because otherwise people will take it from you."

Raijin stared at her with a sinking heart. His unhappy, warlike sister. Her worst nightmares, her lack of faith in people, now confirmed.

"But he didn't, ya know?" he told Fujin. "Not everyone's like—I mean. Seifer's not like that. Seifer didn't try to take it from you."

"No," Fujin said, after a moment. "He didn't."

Cid came downstairs then, still cursing and calling Mayor Dobe a son of a bitch, and he only stopped when he saw them watching him. Immediately he looked contrite. Beneath the sound of Dobe yelling back at him – giving as good as he got for all his pacifist principles – Cid gave a sad smile and dipped his chin in their direction. 

"I really am sorry," he said, more calm than he'd been so far. "If you ever want her back – Pandemona, Seifer says she's called – then you need only come to Garden. I know your father disagrees with me on some things. But. It's the least I can do. There will always be a place for you at Garden. And as long as you're there, she'll be yours."

Then he was gone.

Fujin made up her mind then. And when Fujin made up her mind, Raijin made his up too. Zell saw Raijin very clearly now. A loyal person, if not a terribly smart one. A smart person would have stayed in the peaceful junk pile, learned to be a fisherman. But then Raijin wasn't a fishing prodigy anyway, for all that he liked doing it. And he liked his sister more than he liked casting a line, and when he closed his eyes he saw her laid out in front of him on the train platform, covered in blood, and he worried about what might happen to her if he wasn't there to defend her.

They caught up with Seifer, Cid, and Xu halfway back to Timber. Xu saw them first and stopped, as if struck dumb, and seemed to want to say something. They ignored her, walking right past. Seifer was sitting on the rail with his back to the sea, shaking his head, and he didn't notice them at first.

"I don't want it," he was saying angrily. "I don't want to junction it. You stole it. It belongs to that girl, so I don't want it, and I don't want any of them!"

"Seifer," Cid said, bringing a hand to his crown and shaking his head. "Please. I don't want to have to discipline you."

Seifer snorted. "So let Xu do it," he taunted, making Xu flush red. "She wanted you to let her start – what was it? A Disciplinary Committee? Sounds like the kind of thing she'd like. Let her loose on the student body. See how may people she can take from by force—"

"SEIFER," Fujin said, cutting him off.

Seifer looked up and, catching sight of them, blinked in surprise. Cid turned around and broke into a grin.

"Well!" he said happily. "Well. Well, welcome. I didn't think we'd see you quite this soon." And, true to his word, he handed over a very familiar Manifest. Fujin took it and turned it over in her hands. She couldn't wear it where she used to – that was all still bandaged. Instead she tucked it into her shirt.

"We have to find you weapons," Cid said right away, thinking aloud. "Lots of good weapons to pick from. Obviously we assemble them ourselves for the cadets, though, and so there's a limit, you know in terms of expense and equipment. Seifer benefitted from being an early recruit, so he has a gunblade. And Xu was early too, so she got to take our last good whip—"

"I'm giving it up," Xu said quickly, behind Fujin and Raijin. Her voice was very unhappy. Fujin and Raijin still ignored her.

"They don't seem all that interested in whips," Seifer said, looking tensely from Fujin to Raijin. Cid had pressed something on him as he'd spoken to Fujin and Raijin. Another Manifest, as it turned out: some kind of pin. Frowning, he stuck it to his collar, as true to his word as Cid was.

"Oh, well, maybe we'll save that for Miss Trepe," Cid said quickly. "She was mentioning she wanted to switch over from throwing knives. We also have—"

"I'll just take a really big stick, ya know?" Raijin said, looking at Seifer.

"CHAKRAM," said Fujin, also looking past Cid to Seifer.

Seifer broke into a smile.

"My goodness," Cid said. "Decided already! That's what I like to see. I can tell you'll both settle in just fine." He clapped his hands together. "Well! Let's get going. We can get to know each other on the way, can't we? Yes, we can."

And so all of them – Cid, Seifer, Xu, Raijin, and Fujin – began the trek to Timber.

It was an awkward journey. Seifer seemed to want to say something to them, but couldn't seem to form the words, and Xu was worse, glancing at them anxiously before falling into step with Cid, just ahead, and valiantly pretending that they weren't there. Cid kept up a cheerful patter about beginner training techniques that Seifer had already taught them. Fujin and Raijin both ignored him.

Fujin touched Seifer's sleeve.

"THANK YOU," she said.

Seifer said, "For what?" a little carelessly, waving one arm as though to wipe away the thanks.

Fujin and Raijin looked at eachother, then back at him. Seifer said, a little arrogantly, "You oughtta stick by me at Garden. Some of those kids are real losers, but you're not so bad. We could be a—a posse. If you want."

"Us and you and Squall?" Raijin suggested.

Seifer blinked, as though he'd just forgotten something important, and couldn't believe he had. "Yeah," he said, after a minute. "Yeah. You and me and Squall. And Squall. Squall, too. A posse."

"What's that?" Cid said, turning around. "Are you three getting along already? Good! Good. Say. Seifer brought this up earlier, and you seem like good candidates. How would you three feel about heading up the Disciplinary Committee?"

He smiled brightly at them. He had a wonderful, fatherly smile.

-

Cid wasn't smiling in the present.

When they'd reached Edea's room in Trabia, she wasn't there. So Cid just stood there uselessly, at a loss for words. Like he couldn't quite figure out what had happened.

Fujin had thought he was smart enough to figure it out. There was a smear of blood on the hotel floor, a coffee table shattered to bits, and no Edea to be found. It was cut-and-dry. Solving this mystery ought to have been easy, like taking a GF from a little girl.

Someone had kidnapped, possibly murdered, his wife.

"GONE," Fujin told Cid pitilessly. Cid was breathing hard. He stumbled, and steadied himself on the wall.

Fujin regarded him dispassionately.

If she could have traded Edea to rescue Seifer and her brother, she would have done it gladly. But then something told her that this was all connected somehow anyway. She sniffed the air. It smelled like smoke and earth. Like down there. Fujin examined the doorframe. Dirt. Dirt all around. There were three slashes on the wall, marks left by some careless hand. Fujin traced them. She thought she knew which blade had put them there.

She knew the blade very, very well.

"Who's done this?" Cid asked the empty room. He ran a hand through his hair, wild and agitated. He said, "And how? The hotel manager would have seen! Or heard, when she screamed for help! Who did this?"

Fujin wasn't sure she had screamed. She might even have invited her assailant in. Fujin traced the marks again. She said to herself, very low, "The bright Hyperion. His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first time I wrote this chapter, it turned out so much longer than the other chapters that going over it now gave me stress flashbacks. I think some of the later chapters now rival it for length, though.
> 
> The head-stealing sorceress is based on, you guessed it, L. Frank Baum's Langwidere. Seifer inadvertently takes from Man and Superman when he complains about Garden, because I liked the line (though not Man and Superman. Go figure). & the poem is a real poem because I write many things but I do not write good poems. I borrowed Keats so that you wouldn't have to deal with my attempts at poetry. Actual line: "He enter'd, but he enter'd full of wrath; His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels, And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire, That scar'd away the meek ethereal Hours. And made their dove-wings tremble."
> 
> D:


	14. Chapter 14

At this time, Irvine was in fairly medieval chains on a class-C Galbadian prison boat that was almost as old as the chains and that stank of bodily fluids best not named. Galbadia had rolled out the most theatrical equipment they had for him. Television crews had lovingly filmed his transport from the prison to the boat, the confiscation of his weapons and GFs, and then -- to go by what Irvine's guards had been discussing -- had interviewed several prominent Deling City residents about the problem of SeeDs on the streets.

Xu was gonna be pissed.

This worsened his mood, which was already pretty bad. He’d spent a sleepless night being questioned by Galbadian interrogators threatening a torture they knew perfectly well they couldn’t carry out under the current agreement. Irvine had opted to retreat inside his mind -- uncomfortably empty, after they'd taken Siren -- and ignore them. 

There was the whole Hobbs Worth thing to consider instead. The Hobbs Worth thing became more and more peculiar the more Irvine thought about it.

Obviously, they had been set up. And Worth had been set up too, probably, and Caraway was probably in on it, and all to hide a GF from Garden. Which made no sense, because what single GF was so powerful that Galbadia had to go through all this trouble? Siren was a pretty decent GF: queen of boosting status ailments, capable of silencing any magic-user and making an even playing field a slightly more unfair fight. Irvine felt perfectly comfortable with her and no other GFs, an odd development given that many people tried to stockpile as many GFs as possible, but then he knew the risks.

But even Xu wouldn't have staged a massive fake raid just to keep Siren. Or for that matter even Eden.

Maybe the Galbadians wanted to discredit Garden. But that wasn't worth all this hoopla. In certain corners, Garden was already discredited. Irvine knew that better than anybody. In Trabia and Balamb and Timber and Dollet, Garden was revered, honored. Liked, even, depending on who you were talking to. But in Deling City? Among Caraway’s own people? They were trash. You wore your cadet duds around school grounds because otherwise Martine would put the screws in and make you dig desert latrines for the army or something, but you took them off the second decent people might spot you. That you had ended up at Garden proved you were either from somewhere else, not a proper Deling person at all, or else you were the lowest rung of Deling society. Destined for the military, not able to get your education anywhere else, had to sell yourself to Martine’s army pipeline to be worth a damn.

And Irvine already had a bad name just in and of himself, not connected to Garden in any way. So his being a sexual menace, or whatever they were selling, was hardly going to come as a surprise to anyone who happened to turn on the Deling City nightly news. Slandering him had to be an added perk. No, the real problem had to be that they’d stumbled onto something Caraway didn’t want them to see, him and Rinoa and—

It took him a second to recall.

…Selphie? He’d bartered away the memory of Selphie for some reason. Siren had taken it. Then, while he wasn’t looking, or maybe even at his instruction, Siren had taken his reasons for the bartering too. If Siren remembered doing this (which she probably wouldn’t), then Irvine would have Words with her about it when she got back to him. And she would get back to him; his guards’ vicious prods to get him below decks had suggested that Xu had demanded the return of both the GF _and_ the Seed – probably the GF first, if he knew Xu – and so Galbadia would reap no concrete rewards that these grunts could see, and they'd resolved to take it out on him.

Which was fine. Doctor K could heal the bruises. It was the memory lapse he was more concerned about. Now that sleep deprivation was making the edges of his brain prickly and anxious, he worried that he'd lost some crucial detail, something necessary for unraveling the whole thing.

But, even more than that, he worried because it was _Selphie_. What could make him give her up? It made no sense. He’d never given her up. Not ever. Just lots of other people. Most people, really. Apparently at least one ex-girlfriend who had nudes. Why couldn’t Siren have taken the moment when he’d figured _that_ out? Parts of that were still burned into his brain. Which was overtired, stressed, and desperately wanted a drink.

Now a soldier came down into the hold and hard jabbed at his temple to get his attention. This was probably in violation of something.

“We’re here,” said the soldier. “Get up. They’re paying us some nice gil for you, at least.”

Irvine gave an internal curse. Xu ran the budget with a fist closed tighter than an old Dolletian chastity belt. She _hated_ losing money. He was going to get the dressing down of his life. Possibly demoted. No. Definitely demoted. Maybe kicked out of Seed; it wasn’t like they needed a sexual menace on the payroll. Which. He was mostly in SeeD to be with his friends, so whatever, he wouldn’t much miss SeeD. But if he didn’t have SeeD, where would he go? Even the residents of Fisherman’s Horizon didn’t seem to like him. The last time he’d been there, on their way to Esthar not long ago, he’d been hustled to the now-functioning train station by the hotel attendant and told point blank that he looked like a dangerous killer, please consider leaving.

The lack of sleep was turning his mind in weird directions. He shoved all that away and concentrated on making it up the ladder with the blinding sun beating down on him, his shackles making the trip difficult, the soldier prodding at him to go faster. When he made it to the deck he was hustled down a gangplank none-too-gently and then practically shoved at Xu.

Xu wasted no time. She strode forward to meet the Galbadians, demanding that they take the chains off of Irvine, give her Siren, and leave at once. Her hurry made more sense to Irvine a few moments later. 

His shackles were off, he had a cadet propping him, and they’d rounded the corner of the Balamb Hotel, with orders from Xu to report to Doctor K immediately. And there they were: the White SeeDs. Their ship was docked in the blue waters behind the hotel, tarps pulled low over it. This way the Galbadians wouldn’t be able to identify them right away, if at all. This was sensible; the White SeeDs would want to initiate and control all contact with the Galbadians. They were unofficial allies with Timber and Esthar these days, some gambit of Matron’s to try and make up for having almost handed world power to Deling City and also for being possessed by the woman who later ordered a Lunar Cry on Laguna’s people. Only what were they doing in Balamb, on regular SeeD territory? And why was Quistis on the deck of their ship?

At first Irvine thought it was sleep loss combining with the glaring Balamb sun to play tricks on him. Hadn’t Quistis gone to Centra? Had the other team come back with the White SeeDs? And so soon? Why? Irvine steadied himself on the cadet's arm, making her scowl at him, and straightened to get a better look. Quistis wasn’t alone. Zell was there, looking somehow defeated.

“’Scuse me,” Irvine said, stumbling away from the cadet and changing course to the White SeeD ship.

“Hey! You need to get to the Infirmary!” said the cadet.

“Sure do,” Irvine breathed out. He really did, too. He felt like he’d been chewed up and spat out, like he'd been devoured in battle, and that wasn’t an offhand metaphor. Thanks to some confuse spells that had been performed on his teammates once, he knew what that felt like for real – it was awful. You needed a curaga and maybe a nice nap in a tent afterwards, at least. But his friends were up there, apparently derailed from their mission just as he’d been derailed from his, and Zell, if possible, looked maybe as bad as Irvine felt. His hair hung limp over his face, his skin was too pale, and his eyes were strangely flat. Something had happened. They might need help. Irvine wasn’t going to ditch them; this wasn’t the D-District, and he was a better person now; he didn’t leave his friends to rot.

Or at least he thought he didn’t. The missing memories of Selphie continued to spark a small riot in his brain. He had to have a good reason for that. Right?

“Yo. You look bad,” Zell told him, when Irvine came up to the deck.

“I’d tell you the same,” Irvine said, “But if I look any worse than you, I’d better hold it in. I’m gonna have to skate by on my charming personality from now on.”

Zell, weirdly enough, didn't puff up and take offense at this. He just gave a tired nod, devoid of cheer, and turned up the corners of his mouth like he wanted to show he knew it was a joke, but he lacked completely the energy to do so. Which, for Zell, meant something had to be wrong. He and Quistis had been deep in discussion over something. Now they broke off and she said, “Irvine, what happened to you?”

“Prison,” Irvine said shortly.

“What? Weren’t you on a mission with Selphie? She didn’t mention you’d been thrown in prison!” said Quistis.

“She didn’t?” Irvine said, his heart sinking. Selphie was angry with him. They’d fought. Broken up, maybe. That was why he’d traded away the memory. Oh, Hyne. And it was probably his fault, too.

“Well, I’m not sure I gave her the time to,” Quistis admitted sheepishly, after a moment.

“We were taken by Ellone,” said Zell. “Me and Squall.”

Irvine stared at him, befuddled by this new piece of information. Being taken by Ellone usually didn’t leave people looking the way Zell looked. Irvine said this. Quistis said, “I was just thinking that, actually.”

“I didn’t tell you the whole story,” Zell said, actually squirming under her stare. “Just the beginning.”

“Well, that was interesting,” she began, “But hardly useful. I mean, fine, maybe once he wasn’t horrible—“

“Who?” Irvine cut in. “What’s the story?”

Surprisingly, both Quistis and Zell sighed, like Irvine didn’t know what he was signing up for.

“It’s complicated. It doesn’t even make sense to us,” Quistis muttered. She had a book in her lap and now she rapped her knuckles against it, annoyed.

“It’s a Hyne-damned enigma,” Zell said. “Wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an ugly grey coat that it thinks is cool.”

Irvine blinked at them. Before he could ask for further clarification, Xu came up to the deck, trailed by some angry-looking White SeeDs and the cadet Irvine had abandoned back on Balamb soil. Xu pointed a finger at Zell.

“I'm taking 10,000 gil from your paycheck to cover ship repair,” she told him. Zell, who was usually pretty respectful to Xu, just looked at her flatly and didn’t say anything to appease her, didn’t salute, didn’t even complain. He worked his jaw. Xu raised an eyebrow, seemingly noting this, but didn’t comment on it. Instead she rounded on Irvine.

“And you,” she said, transferring the finger to him, “You need to get to the Infirmary now. In fact, you both look like you could use it!”

She packed them off with the cadet, staying behind herself to talk to Quistis. The trek to Garden was one of the worst Irvine had ever made in his life, and he was counting that time they’d lost their rental car and had to hike across wild monster territory from the Tomb of the Unknown King. Every inch of him hurt, he was tired, and he’d given away memories of his girlfriend and was worrying about it -- a constant fearful worry in the back of his head. And he wasn't the only one. The longer Zell walked the more he looked ready to drop. He had to be sick or something. Sick and angry. Zell was always emotional, so the anger wasn't so strange, but the way he wore it was: muted, taut, somehow drained by whatever was infesting him. It fell to their beleaguered cadet escort to defeat most of the attacking caterchipillars on the way.

The overly-helpful cadet also saw them straight to the infirmary even though they tried to dismiss her about nine times. When she was gone, they both collapsed onto the fainting couch behind Kadowaki’s desk. Irvine slumped forward and massaged his bruised wrists. Zell leaned back on his hands. Irvine eyed the infirmary bed from here, and snuck a glance at Zell to try and see if it would be rude to snatch it. Zell looked like he needed sleep as badly as Irvine did. But Zell was regarding the bed with a kind of horror, like just the thought of going to sleep was nauseating.

Not all nice dreams from Ellone this time, then.

The swish of the door announced Dr. K. She bustled in, a B-Garden staple, kind and motherly and Garden-efficient. Her kindness meant that Irvine could never really feel comfortable around her. At G-Garden they just threw potions at you and if that didn’t fix you they wrote up a discharge letter; they didn’t pretend to be your friend. But his level of trust here didn’t matter, because he was going to get checked over whether he liked it or not. Dr. K pointed a finger at him.

“You first, Irvine,” she said. “Haven’t I told you to be more careful on missions?”

Had she? She probably had. He’d pulled a stint in Trabia in the second month after the war, trying to impress Selphie, and had ended up nearly buried under an unstable wall when it had collapsed. Dr. K had been there at around the same time and had to have patched him up, since the Trabian medical staff had mostly been dead at the time. But he couldn’t remember more than that. 

Dr. K took him into the next room, giving Zell instructions to lie down and make himself comfortable. She checked Irvine, brusque and firm and perfectly Doctor-ly, not at all fazed to have the world’s biggest pervert stripped down to a blue open-backed gown on her medical table. Then she had him dose himself with potions for some ailments, bound him up where the potions were going to discourage proper healing, and ordered him to put his shirt and pants back on. He did so and made to leave. She stopped him.

“Irvine, a minute,” she said. “It seems I completely forgot to administer the teamwork questionnaire to you.”

Irvine blinked at her. He had no idea what that was.

“It’s a simple questionnaire designed to maximize team communication and efficiency,” Doctor K. said. “We usually give it to people four months after their SeeD test, and then at intervals after that, but you skipped the test, so I never put you down for it. Silly me. Lie down and we’ll get it over with soon enough.”

Irvine felt like protesting for Zell’s sake – something was clearly wrong with Zell and he might need medical attention right away – but Dr. K shushed him and made him lie down again. Then she took out a clipboard and paper and a pen, and started to ask him about Squall, and how was working with Squall (fine), and Rinoa and how was working with Rinoa (Rinoa wasn’t technically Garden personnel so that was a weird question, but fine), and Quistis and how was working with Quistis (fine), and did he think Quistis put too much pressure on herself—

Bizarre. Why did _that_ matter?

“I guess?” Irvine said. “She seems sad a lot.”

“Why do you think that, Irvine?”

He really had no idea? It was just a general sense that he got from her. He remembered her as bossy and triumphant in her orphanage days. Now she was mostly regulation-calm, but in such a way that you started thinking maybe she had some issues boiling up underneath the surface. But he wasn’t going to say that to Kadowaki. Oh God, was this a snitch test? Was he being asked to snitch on her? This was standard G-Garden procedure, of course, but the way the Balamb kids went on, you’d think Cid's people didn’t do this kind of thing.

“None of this counts for purposes of evaluating the other SeeDs, Irvine,” said Dr. K, like she could read his mind. “It’s just for working out how you’re communicating with them on the team. Let’s make it a little more general, just to keep you comfortable. How can you tell when someone is sad? What gives you that information?”

“I guess…she just looks the way I feel when I’m sad,” Irvine said, which was as vague as he could be while still being truthful.

“Hmm,” said Dr. K. “Tell me more about that.”

Weirdly, over the next thirty minutes he found himself telling her a lot. Not about Quistis, though. He didn’t want to sell her out in case this was a snitch test, and he didn’t want to do that to Zell and Selphie and Squall, either. So every time Dr. K got close to them, he hedged until she asked a more general question or prompted him with some of these strange ink-splattered cards she had (free association could tell her a lot, she informed him calmly), and then he just sort of talked about himself. About Galbadia. About Selphie. About Bexley.

“He hit me once,” Irvine said, feeling a little miserable to bring it up, but also weirdly relieved. How could you be miserable and relieved at the same time? Didn’t matter. He was. That was how he felt.

“Just once?”

“I only remember the once. Guess if it was more than once, I gave the other memories away, but kept the once so I wouldn’t forget what he can do.”

That seemed like the sort of gambit he might have pulled with a GF. Another one of these little bargains. Weird trades. Giving away the moments he’d hated, the parts of himself he didn’t like, the parts of his history he couldn't face. How messed up was that?

And _Selphie_. He’d given up Selphie. Why? Had they had a fight? Would he give her up if they did? How could he even trust himself with her? Selphie would never give him away, but him? He gave people away all the time.

“Tell me about that, Irvine.”

So then he did. His misery and relief deepened as he did it. Misery because he felt like he was really seeing himself clearly for the first time in a long time, seeing how spotty his memory was and how, for him, all those spots were deliberately picked out. Selected. How cowardly was he, that he couldn’t face up to his own memories? But then he also felt relief to share that fact with someone else. It was a dirty secret, but he didn’t have to carry it alone. His friends looked to him to be the memory-keeper. Faithful Irvine, guardian of the orphanage days. Up until now, only he had known just how faithless he really was.

“They’re not,” he told Kadowaki. “Not faithless. They’re better than that. Like Selphie, Selphie cares about her friends first, and she’d _never_ do what I did. She keeps diaries of us. Every minute. Even the bad stuff she just makes jokes about, turns into good things, so she can remember it all and be happy about it. She’s like that.”

“You’re dating Selphie, correct?”

“It doesn’t interfere with her performance as a Seed,” Irvine said quickly.

Dr. K said, “Don’t worry about Selphie. Selphie has quite a good reputation. How does that make you feel?”

Selphie did have a good reputation. Or at least he hoped she did. He hoped she hadn’t been dragged through the news like he had for the whole Deling City fiasco.

“Good,” Irvine said. “She deserves a good reputation. She isn’t _me_ –“

“Unpack that for me,” said Dr. K.

He did. He talked about how he was simultaneously a fashionable rake and a complete moral degenerate by Deling standards; about how lonely it got with not even your own memories to keep you company; about how you couldn’t talk about feeling sad, not really, not without being a real pissant of a man, so for that you had to go have sex to talk to somebody; about Rill and how he couldn’t remember her, but didn’t remember bad things, but that didn’t mean he wanted himself all over the papers; about being a sadsack but people never noticed the way they did with Quistis and Squall, because he could cover it up better, only maybe he covered it up too well, and now people thought he never felt anything at all—

“But it's not a big deal,” he said, half desperately. “It’s not a big deal. I can handle myself.”

“Good,” Dr. K. said soothingly. “Now, tell me, Irvine. Last question. Do you think anything we’ve talked about will interfere with the performance of your duties as a SeeD? Anything. Be honest.”

“No,” Irvine said automatically. Xu was already probably lining up reasons to fire him. No need to give her any more. But then he thought about it for a half-second, thought about how he’d traded away memories of the mission and who knew? Maybe they were crucial memories. Maybe they were what the team would need to figure out Caraway’s endgame. And he’d just handed that information off to Siren, who might not even be able to hand it back to him, and then what? Wasn’t that the definition of interfering with his work, right there?

He was a piss-poor SeeD and a piss-poor boyfriend in one, probably. He opened his mouth to confess this.

There was a ruckus just beyond the curtain. Rinoa and Xu, calling for Dr. K. Something about Squall. Irvine shot up. Dr. K tucked her clipboard in a drawer and was out in a flash. Irvine followed. In the main room of the infirmary were Rinoa, Selphie (who looked pleased to see Irvine, which left him feeling both relieved and guilty), Xu, Quistis, Zell, a medical intern at Dr. K’s desk, and, weirdly, Nida. They were all clustered around the infirmary bed in the other room. Squall was on it. He wasn’t moving, but he had his eyes open. He looked. Well. Terrified.

That was a really unnatural look on Squall. Irvine didn't like it. 

“What happened?” Irvine demanded.

“He needs medical help,” Xu snapped. “Dr. K, get to him. Quistis, in with her. Where’s Vandarajan?” The intern’s head shot up at her command. “Good. You’ve got Dincht. Dincht, get in the next room with him. He'll look you over. You three, stay here until I call for you. Someone give Kinneas the couch. He looks like he’s gonna die. Nida, let’s go. We have to track down Cid. I’ll be back in as soon as I can, and then—” Here she leveled them all with an ominous glare. “We debrief fully.”

Then she and Nida were gone.

Irvine insisted that he didn’t need the couch. He hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours and felt rubbed raw, now emotionally as well as physically exhausted. But it seemed un-chivalrous to make Rinoa and Selphie stand, especially since he’d been the idiot who'd been captured. And since he felt like he owed Selphie an apology, though he didn't know what for.

Luckily, neither Rinoa nor Selphie bought into his bluster. Although they were each significantly smaller than he was, they manhandled him onto the couch with ease. Then Selphie sat down next to him and put her arms around his head and kissed him. She said, her voice heavy with relief, “I’m so glad you’re alright!”

Not a fight then. Something else.

“It was a set-up, those creeps!” Selphie said. “No offense, Rinoa, but your dad’s a creep.”

Rinoa didn't seem to take offense. Rinoa didn't seem to do much of anything. She was staring at the door of the room where Squall was, fingering a new silver choker she’d somehow acquired. Her gaze was tight with more than worry. Either way, there was no time to think on it. Selphie was spilling everything she’d theorized about Caraway and Tulip Ruta. Irvine added what he knew about Hobbs Worth and the conclusions he’d come to, careful not to let slip that he had given away memories of Selphie for reasons unknown.

“They’re covering up this GF thing,” Irvine said. “For some reason. But why?”

“Maybe it’s the most powerful GF ever!” said Selphie. “Opens its mouth and boom! Apocalypse.”

Somehow that seemed unlikely, but it wasn’t like they had more to go on.

There was a chuckle from Rinoa. This was a weird moment to chuckle, with her boyfriend convulsing in the next room. In her defense, though, it was a mirthless chuckle. Her face was dead serious: plainly unhappy, tight, and a little furious.

“You wish,” Rinoa muttered.

“Noooo,” Selphie said, confused. “I don’t. Why would I want the Galbadians to have possession of a GF like that?”

Rinoa started, stared at her. “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said, after a minute.

“Then who were you talking to?” Irvine said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rinoa said quickly. Her face went blank. She didn't say anything else.

“I think it does matter,” Selphie whispered after a minute, bringing her mouth down to Irvine’s ear, a tickly, intimate thing that made Irvine’s breath seize up. “She’s been…weird. Ever since we left her in the library. Not really here. Almost like she’s having a conversation with somebody nobody can see, and then her powers are—“

As if to punctuate this, Rinoa had begun to scowl at no one in particular.

“Fine,” Rinoa declared to the open air. “Maybe I should tell them so that they can help me present my side of the story to Xu, since you think Xu’s so inherently horrible and mean and likely to get angry with me—“

“She is,” Irvine put in. “She will.”

“Xu’s a freakin’ blue dragon in human form, are you kidding?” Selphie said. “Did you not see her chew Nida out?”

Rinoa, who always believed the best of people, opened her mouth as if to chastise them for saying these things about their commanding officer (who Irvine was pretty sure she didn’t even like much; it was probably the principle of the thing). Then she closed it without saying anything.

“No need to be smug,” she snapped. Then she was quiet for a minute, but began to look increasingly furious.

“We… weren’t…?” Irvine offered. “Being smug, I mean.”

“I think that was the guy in your head,” Selphie told Rinoa. “Which. Maybe you should be seen by Dr. K. Because you’re being a little crazy. And now is not the time, because Squall is out of commission, and Galbadia has this GF—“

“Right,” Rinoa said. “No. They don’t.”

Irvine and Selphie stared at her.

“I do,” Rinoa said, in a small voice. “I took him. They don’t have him anymore. Which is nice for them, because he’s a _jerk_ , and he can shut up now, because guess what? I’m going to tell you everything.” Then she rolled her eyes and added, to no one they could see, “No, you don’t get a say in whether I tell them. We voted. Angelo voted with me. Yes, Angelo gets a vote. Yeah, fine, sure. Only if they help me present it to Xu. Whatever, as my _boyfriend_ would say.

“Oh, would you shut up about not trusting Xu already?” 

-

So now comes the story of how Rinoa Heartilly, amateur sorceress, found herself junctioned to the worst GF she ever encountered, one who was so impossible to deal with that he effortlessly antagonized her other GFs, and so then she’d had to give those to Selphie, all while trying to keep her cool, arguing with the new GF, learning that her boyfriend was in trouble, and suspecting that her magic was going _insane_. This story takes place on the day before, March 19th, and begins just as she recklessly left her friends behind in the library. Rinoa would have told it earlier. But she was simply too preoccupied to tell it when the GF was monopolizing all her attention.

Monopolizing people’s attention was his entire personality, in a nutshell.

So. Back to March 19th. It occurred to Rinoa, when halfway up the library stairs, that maybe she could have explained the sudden manifestation of her powers a little better. She didn't like explaining her powers.

They were often embarrassing developments, similar to those odd expansions and upheavals her nanny used to call “blossoming into womanhood” and Caraway used to call “for Hyne’s sake, woman, surely a training bra can take care of it.” But while Rinoa had sauntered into puberty determined not to let it bring her down, it was hard to feel the same way about changes that left the rest of the world convinced you were just waiting for your chance to assassinate a president or two. So upon gaining sorceress powers, for the first time in her life she opted for the Squall Leonhart method. She just kept moot. Better to say nothing than to risk capsizing the legitimacy of the new Timber government, giving a bad name to the SeeDs, and throwing more awful publicity on her friends. Just because they kept company with someone who could sprout wings, levitate heavy books, and sense magic.

That was why she’d gone invisible. She’d sensed magic. The same magic user she’d felt before; she was sure of it. Still in the library.

Her friends, tenacious SeeDs that they were, had been too busy chasing down a lead to hear a proper explanation even if she'd wanted to offer one. So she’d gone invisible. She hadn’t thought it through; it had just seemed like a good idea at the time. She'd be able to sneak around the library undetected, tracking down the original source. And they would get to head off the second source, per their orders from Xu. There. Neat and tidy.

This was really a Timber Owls-style plan. That was to say, not the best under the circumstances. Rinoa could see that a few seconds into it. She hadn’t been strategizing, as much as reacting to the sudden insistent magical throbbing against her skull, and maybe the equally sudden arrival of Missy Spaiss.

Missy was one of these people who you knew for years and years, but who it always seemed you’d met only yesterday for all the impact she had on you. Nice. Downright weird about the sorceress thing, but in such a kind way that Rinoa couldn’t help but feel bad and want to apologize for never once in her life having given Missy more than the most cursory of second thoughts. They’d met at around age three and attended dance lessons and classes together for years, until a death in Missy’s family had pulled Missy out of school for months and relegated her to class B on her return. Rinoa had written her a card out of genuine sympathy; she’d lost her mother at around the same time and Missy’s pain had seemed very real. Missy had written her a thank you. And then aside from that they hadn’t spoken much. Missy had, at least, never grown into one of the cattier, more passive aggressive girls at Gryphon Prep.

Now, Tulip Ruta, on the other hand.

It wasn’t that surprising to discover that she might be silly enough to _want_ to be a sorceress. Rinoa wished Irvine and Selphie luck with her, and also wished that maybe someone would knock some sense into the girl before she hurt herself. Though, to be fair, people often thought things like that about Rinoa. So. 

So instead she focused on the casting. Someone was casting. Find the caster. A simple SeeD mission for the world’s most obvious not-SeeD.

Rinoa didn't want to be a SeeD, not really. People kept accusing her of playing at SeeD like a little girl because she never bothered to sign up and become a cadet, but how could she? She was a sorceress. She was a walking conflict of interest. And while she liked most of the SeeDs she’d met, SeeD was still a military machine. Rinoa had opted out of that kind of thing when she’d run away from home and pledged herself to Timber’s democracy. She could have continued at Gryphon and then Deling City University, dedicated herself to Deling’s aims, and taken a position as her father’s aide de camp on graduation. She’d be twice as military as most SeeDs then, with four times the power over other people, given how the Galbadian military was run.

But the Galbadian military wasn't a good system. Not a moral one.

Now Garden -- Garden hobbled by morally. They were in the clear, unlike Galbadia, but only because they helped more people than they hurt. Late at night, with Squall’s breath deep and even and calming at her shoulder, Rinoa often reminded herself of this. SeeD put more good than evil into the world. Definitely. Probably. Sure, they fought for money. Killed people for money. Toppled governments for money. And they did mostly as they were told by their clients, no free choice or honest democracy involved. But then she'd been a client of theirs, so how hypocritical was it to judge them? And how silly and idealistic and judgmental was she to care if they were good people? Of course they were. Squall and Zell and Selphie and Irvine and Quistis were all good people. Maybe even Xu was, deep down where no one could see.

But whole Garden enterprise, in and of itself, was not inherently good. It was, in fact, somewhat crooked. Cid Kramer had bilked money from a prominent Shumi and trapped him in an endlessly regenerating cocoon, and even if that Shumi hadn't been very nice, that didn’t erase the shadiness of all that. And out in the reaches of Galbadia, under Martine, Cid's organization had made bids that ended up strengthening the Galbadian army. And, day after day, Garden handed memory-sucking GFs to children, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world, except that according to Squall _informing_ the children that they could lose their very identities was a recent policy. Eight months old, in fact. Instituted by the Commander. Due to an offhand comment made by his girlfriend about basic ethics, which had never occurred to him before as being at all relevant to how they conducted Garden business. Being, as he was, Garden-raised, and therefore not terribly concerned with ethics.

Now, maybe she was just the Commander’s silly girlfriend, the way Julia Heartilly had just been the General’s silly wife. But Julia wouldn't have gotten very far when it came to freeing Timberi political prisoners if she’d joined the army to do it. As the general's wife, on the other hand...

Rinoa hadn’t sold herself to Squall to reform SeeD. She _loved_ Squall, and ending up with Squall had just sort of happened. But if reform was a neat side benefit, then she was going to take advantage of it. And if she became a cadet? Then that perk would evaporate. Because cadets didn't have much say in anything at Garden: less, in fact, than Squall’s silly sorceress girlfriend did.

All this was to say that she didn't have to be a SeeD to be useful to them, or at least to the ones she loved. She could be an intrepid sorceress, and that would have to be enough. And who else but an intrepid sorceress could have detected the casting?

She followed her intrepid sorceress instincts. The library stairs opened up onto landings that circled and looked out on the entry hall below. On the first landing, nothing pinged her. The GF and its current master were higher up. She moved on to the top floor. She passed the girl’s lavatory with its delicate glass statues and marble fountain just outside; nothing there. Nothing in the stacks. Nothing in the individual study rooms. But there—the star ceiling reading room! Maybe there.

She was lucky she was invisible. The room had nothing to hide behind. No tall shelves. Only short ones, coming up to mid height, easy to see over; and many ornate round tables; and low, cozy seats patterned in the city colors; and huge floor-to-ceiling windows along one end that offered up a vista of the commercial district, twinkling underneath a pall of ever-present smog to the south.

Missy had said that no one was here. Missy was either misinformed, or a liar. _Everyone_ was here. All of them, minus Missy and minus Tulip, who was apparently off in some nightclub. Alkonet, Baymoss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta (that is, Tulip’s brother, Pindar, leaning over a red book on the far table), Betel, and Calaminth. Eight perfect Deling City heirs. Along with Tulip and Missy, the only children Fury Caraway had ever let within a foot of his daughter if he could help it. And was so _odd_ to see them again, as odd as it had been just a few days ago. They were, after all, very changed and yet still so much the same.

Fashions in Deling City were completely different now. No one did highlights or was wearing dusters anymore. Baymoss – that is, Selene, who’d been Leenie and Rinoa’s best friend until Leenie had grown old enough to realize that Rinoa was a weirdo – had kept her golden hair long and flowing for all the time Rinoa had known her. She'd been impossibly vain about it. But now it was cropped short and capped by a jeweled headband with intricate detailing, almost sorceress-like in appearance. Devotion Hyssop had grown three inches, putting him above Rinoa, but still making him the shortest boy in the room without the extremely trendy platform boots he was using to stomp across to the men’s room. Glory Calaminth, ‘Glo’ to every girl in the class but Rinoa, who’d never been granted the honor, was now wearing all black – she’d been doing the same last week – as though she were going through a particularly morbid phase, or impersonating an impoverished Dolletian monk or something. Capsicalle and Selinum, necking in the corner, seemed to be wearing variations on the same designer kilt. August Alkonet had shaved off his red curls and now went in for tatty smoking jackets. Bea Betel had pierced her lower lip, and as her lips were very thin, the effect was to make it look as though the lower half of her face would soon be melting off.

Everyone a little bit changed.

But of course it was all the same old vaguely bored faces, breaking into mild humor or slight irritation occasionally, but generally sort of fixed in tedium, except when their eyes might take on an impish glow because they'd spotted something they found exciting. Generally drugs. Sometimes an attractive person. Sometimes someone to make fun of. Often all three.

What did these people, silly people who had everything handed to them, want with GFs, with magic? And which one of them had the GF?

Before she could even finish thinking the question, Pindar Ruta straightened up. He was perhaps the most interesting of the group, the one Rinoa had always gotten along with best, leagues nicer than his sister, and incredibly intelligent, erudite, and handsome. Though still a snob through and through. He was really the first person who’d taught Rinoa that you could have good and bad in you, since his kind nature was at odds with his staunchly pro-Deling politics.

He snapped his fingers. And then watched, with interest, as fire bloomed up. 

Ruta’s sister wasn't involved with the GF. _Ruta_ was.

“Neat,” was all he said.

“Neat,” Alkonet mimicked, making a face at the word.

“Well, it is,” said Ruta easily. “I hope you haven’t flooded Missy with too many lies.”

“Just enough to send Heartilly scarpering back to Daddy,” said Selene. Then, to Hyssop, who had trooped back in from the men’s room, “After we spotted them chatting down below the landing, we thought it might be best to use her to draw Heartilly off. I swear Heartilly almost sensed something last week.”

Poor Missy. They were manipulating her.

“Rinoa can’t sense things,” Ruta murmured. “She’s not a guard hound. She’s a nice girl. With some…additions, these days.”

“She’s Adel two,” said Selene. “You won’t be laughing when Timber and the Commander conquer us.”

Ruta aimed a finger at her and her designer handbag began to smoke. Selene shrieked, trying to put it out.

“Not cool!” she said. “Stop _using_ it! You’re supposed to deliver it to the General!”

Oh. Oh, fuck. Rinoa never, ever swore, but. _Fuck_. Caraway was in on it. Just when she thought Caraway was maybe improving, that maybe the good in him (and it was there, faint and small and pathetic, the one small flicker that had made life with him bearable for Julia) was winning out… He did something like this. Acquired a GF. In pure violation of his agreement with Garden.

 _Well, come on, Rinoa,_ she told herself. _You didn’t expect him to honor that agreement, did you?_

“He hasn't asked for it,” said Ruta. 

“Only because he’s biding his time, and if you’re caught with it in the meantime it’s curtains for you,” said Glo Calaminth, rolling her eyes. “You should have just left them to their own devices. Why get in the middle?”

“I was selected,” Ruta said sharply, “And it’s an honor. The rest of you should try thinking about something more than yourselves, for once.” 

Then he snapped the book closed and stood, holding it close to him. It was a simple red-bound volume, apparently one in a series, to go by the jacket, which, when Rinoa crept closer, declared it an Unpublished Proof by some unknown. The thing seemed to glow with power. Was a book the GF’s Manifest? That seemed… unwieldy. There were some GFs that were focused in buttons, and some with strange metallic totems, and some that were simply drawn from small rocks. But pebbles or metals you could fashion into jewelry, and the SeeDs often did this. And a button you could sew onto your clothes with relative ease; Zell had shown her how to do this, way back when they’d first met, with Quetzacoatl’s Manifest. At the time, she might have preferred a book. A book you could read; a book was useful. It seemed strange that the SeeDs concentrated so much of their power in little trinkets instead of something useful.

But then how cumbersome would it be to carry a book into battle?

Ruta tucked the book under his arm and strode out of the room, leaving his classmates to roll their eyes at him. Rinoa followed him. 

To…the men’s lavatory. 

Her harebrained adventures sometimes led Rinoa to interesting places. Like, to being ensorcelled by her boyfriend’s old Matron, herself ensorcelled at the time. To being junctioned by the evil sorceress Adel. To floating around in the distant horizons of space. To hanging off the side of the garden for fifteen minutes, while Zell ran around panicking, looking for a rope. That kind of thing. But never to, well, a bathroom. That was new. And slightly uncomfortable.

The men’s lav at Gryphon was a mirror of the women’s, only with elaborately painted urinals (of all things) in place of an elaborately carved powder station. Rinoa focused on the fancy dragon taps and the soft hand towels, and watched Ruta in the mirror, torn between being faithful to the mission and giving in to her discomfort. She didn't want to watch Ruta pee. This seemed to her the ultimate joke – SeeDs on SeeD missions of course got to do thrilling, if morally questionable, SeeD things. They got to shoot, attempt to prevent missile attacks, escape prison, discover ancient sources of mystical power, plumb the depths of the Deep Sea Research laboratory. Silly non-SeeDs, when left to their own devices, got to follow boys into bathrooms. This wasn't morally concerning, but it did speak volumes about the dubious rewards of living a too-upright life. No wonder so many people went in for being jerks-for-pay instead. Jerkitude was exciting. Natural jerks got to have all the fun. While people who tried to do the right thing all the time had to get their kicks in where they could, because soon enough it would be time to discover that all the parental figures in your life were shady in the extreme and would inevitably disappoint you, and also to follow handsome boys into awkward situations that quickly dulled the glamour of knowing them in the first place.

Ruta went into the stall. Rinoa decided to wait outside. Yes, she was invisible and could have poked her head over the stall walls without him knowing. But. Ew. So much about this situation was disgusting, and not even excitingly disgusting like facing down blobras or chomping on massive moon beasts or suffering from poison status effects and leaking green goo out of your ears. Because all that had been horrible, but Rinoa had done it without complaint and not even minded. She’d been on a mission to save the world from an evil future sorceress and her sort-of-ex. That made all the gross moments kind of extraordinary. She could look on them with placid acceptance.

Whereas this was just embarrassing.

Well. No. No, she told herself. It wasn’t. She was doing this for SeeD, or at least to keep Caraway from striking out against her friends. She wasn't particularly committed to SeeD; the issue of which GFs went where was one that had little meaning for her, as long as everyone involved understood the risks and as long as the power of the GFs wasn’t used for evil. But that was just it. Caraway could hardly use power for good. He was the kind of man who could justify the use of excess force to dampen a rebellion that he himself had helped ignite. He’d done it a million times. And GFs were high-profile excessive force now. Ever since Garden had come clean about their group’s involvement and heroism during the Ultimecia War (Rinoa might have had a hand in that; she wouldn't lie to the public, not even if secrecy would have made their lives easier), military groups across the world had become very interested in Garden’s methods. GFs, forgotten in the wake of the Adel war, considered a passing fad of previous decades, became again premier and cutting edge military technology, became something nearly everyone wanted. Caraway could hardly be an exception, and now he'd tasked Pindar Ruta, of all people, with holding onto a new GF, a new source of power, for him.

Which wasn't a crazy scheme. It was actually fairly clever. Ruta was one of Deling City's untouchable beings. No one would dare apprehend or arrest him, not without making a lot of noise and upsetting a lot of powerful people. Gryphon kids like Ruta weren't accountable to anyone, not to the populace, even. They weren't like their parents, power-brokers with a duty to the government. They were hardly adults yet – a weird thought, given that they were the same age as Rinoa’s friends, and Rinoa’s friends couldn’t help but be adults at this point – just coddled, lucky, spoilt creatures, who would take the reins to the city in time, but not right now. Wild, but always given leeway. Always accepted. Respected for the sheer breadth of the opportunities they had. Their foibles written off or quietly tucked away. Their lives shrouded from public view.

Well. Clearly Ruta had seen a path forward to adulthood: Caraway. And that path would be a tangled and ugly one, Rinoa was sure, but then it also seemed fitting. Ruta had always liked the romance of a United Galbadia, and that was Caraway’s chief banner. And Caraway had always liked Ruta, who he found more sensible than Rinoa’s other not-friends.

“So many of those kids you hang out with haven’t got the brains Hyne gave a geezard,” he would say, irritated, on those nights he managed to be home in time for supper (rare, but never treasured).

“Yes, well, you won’t let me hang out with anyone else,” Rinoa would say sweetly.

Hyne. She almost missed sparring with the old anacondaur. She felt a spike of pain at the thought. She loved him, in her own way. But more and more she was beginning to realize that the best way to love him would be in the same way he expressed his love for her. By penning him in on every side, limiting his influence. She’d always been grateful that the Galbadian continent's naming customs tied her to her mother instead of to Caraway, but the truth was, she was half Caraway. She had a streak of old Fury in her too. And it came out when it came time to deal with people she didn’t like very much. She had a tendency fight them in large ways and small, cut them short with a smile, pick and pick and pick at them softly, clandestinely, firmly. Until they either changed their ways or admitted defeat. This was the old spy method, the Fury Caraway method. And, for most of her life, Rinoa had been turning that exact method on Fury Caraway. Because she loved him. But she didn’t like him.

Behind the stall door, she heard the rustling of pages.

Ruta was reading. On Deling’s own bowl. Oh, Hyne. Obnoxiously banal had a new name, and it was ‘Rinoa Heartilly’s daily life.’ Well. She had to get that book, so maybe she should just shut up and put up and do it. It was better than waiting for Ruta to get bored with his bathroom reading. She didn't remember him as especially studious, but he was smart, and waiting around for him to finish could take hours. And hopefully the book would cover any of his bits, right? And it wasn’t like she would be peeping for peeping’s sake. She was just trying to get the lay of the land, to figure out how to take the GF with her. The magic it gave off was all-consuming, brilliant, bright. If she could junction the thing, she knew from experience, it would just meld with her own magic and it would stop bothering her. But as long as someone else had it and was casting, it would needle at her constantly, and this was by far the worst GF she’d encountered in this respect. It was giving her a headache just to be near it.

She crossed into the stall next to Ruta’s, trying to make as little noise as possible. She quietly pulled down the seat, then stood on it and gingerly peeked over the edge of the partition between his stall and hers, holding her breath. Unnecessary. He wasn’t even doing anything. He was completely clothed, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, seated on the top seat with his back against the porcelain tank, his long legs crooked, his feet planted on the stall door. He was lazily rifling through the unpublished proof. He held tightly to one side of it and with his other hand very unconcernedly sparked up a small fire to light his cigarette, which seemed silly until Rinoa realized he’d chosen the stall just below the biggest vent, evidently looking for a quiet place and a smoke.

It wasn’t like she could blame him, with the company he’d been keeping. But she still needed that book. How to get it?

Levitation was useless. It would draw far too much attention. So would flying over the stall and just plucking the book out of his hands. She supposed she could speak pre-Ancient Centran at him, but that would have little effect and might just make him think the bathroom was haunted. Would he drop the book and scurry away in fright? Probably not. That was for children's detective stories, not real life. Maybe she could mute him? Without his voice, he wouldn’t be able to cast as effectively. He was bound to realize that something was wrong then, though, and maybe he would blame it on the GF and conveniently drop it somewhere in order to investigate, but that seemed a long shot. Probably he would instead realize something was up and bring half the library staff down on her head.

So her sorceress powers were completely useless here. As usual.

What would a SeeD do? Engage him in battle, probably. Only she didn’t really want to hurt Ruta. And anyway, she didn’t know what his GF could do. There was no guarantee it wasn’t like Eden and really really powerful. In fact, the strength of his casting suggested that it was a doozy of a GF. So there was no guarantee she’d win the fight, especially on her own. No. She’d have to think outside the box for this to work.

Ruta took a drag of his cigarette. Then, balancing the book on his knees, he quickly snapped it shut, keeping his hand firmly pressed on the front cover. When he lifted the cover again, Rinoa could see why. He’d been hiding something between the cover and the frontispiece. Silver. A chain. A necklace of some sort. He drew it out and crouched over it, letting the book fall to the floor. 

The book wasn't the Manifest. This was.

Only Ruta’s head was blocking her view of it. He was talking to it.

“Don't think, for a second, that I trust you,” he told it furiously. “What you've done to this city is a disgrace. You'll be serving Deling City from this day forward. It'll give some meaning to your life. Consider yourself lucky.”

Ah. She’d totally forgotten how he had this mix of pompous and melodramatic to him. He was a nice person, but the speeches he could produce, simply when offering a rebuttal to her in class, often came off like a combination of Seifer at his craziest and Squall at his most uncharacteristically devoted. In fact, she could probably credit Ruta with immunizing her against boys who had slightly bizarre characters and a lot of hidden passion. He’d had so many intense arguments with her that she had come to find that sort of thing a little charming instead of just obnoxious. Good times.

“Do not presume to tell me my own orders,” Ruta continued stiffly. “In order to keep you safe – which I'm doing for Deling City, _not_ for you -- I plan to keep you with me at all times. SeeD seems to be poking about—“ he broke off, as though the GF was saying something to him, which it probably was. “Well. That gives us a common aim, then,” he said, “Assuming you're being truthful.”

Then he sat and held the Manifest in his hand for a moment. Rinoa soundlessly dropped down to the floor, where she peeked under the partition this time, trying to get a view that wasn’t blocked by Ruta’s head. First she saw the book -- _The Nature of the Sorceress_ , and there was something that would have come in handy last week, if only Ruta hadn’t apparently been monopolizing it – and then the tangle of Ruta’s long legs, and then…

No.

The Manifest looked very familiar. Too familiar. Rinoa freaked out for a second and shoved her head back into her stall, bumping it on the toilet paper dispenser and muffling a shriek of pain.

Ruta straightened up. “Is someone there?” he asked.

Well. Yes. But it was a public restroom, though not exactly open to Rinoa, so whatever. She was about to duck her head under again to get a second look, cursing her stupidity, when Ruta straightened up and picked up the book. Then she heard the jingle of metal and he was opening the door of the stall and striding out. She felt him spark up another fire spell – what, had he only ever encountered one draw point in his entire life? – and peered anxiously around the door of her stall to see him.

He was now wearing it. The Manifest. The really familiar one, which belonged on an entirely different melodramatic mess of a young man, and which she had – she now realized – sort of assumed she’d never see again. She’d never had any idea it was a Manifest. Or that it had been snatched from its original owner. She wasn't sure she even wanted to see it again, but now she wishes it found its way to her around the right throat, in the hands of the _right_ person.

It made her a little angry to find Ruta wearing it. It wasn’t his. And it wasn’t her father’s, either. At the very least, it should have gone to SeeD, or to its owner’s friends or something. If something had happened to him – and something had to have happened, if he’d had a GF wrenched from his grasp after having kept its existence a secret all throughout the war, which he must have done, if that choker was a Manifest, so… 

Well. The something that had happened to him ought to have come at the hands of the people who had once meant something to him. That was a very short list, Rinoa knew. Maybe her and maybe Cid and maybe, like, two other people. But the list definitely didn't include Pindar Ruta. Nor Fury Caraway. 

She didn't quite know what she was doing, or why; she simply knew that she was very, very angry all of a sudden. And when she’d been a normal girl, strong emotions like anger had usually led her to do harebrained things. Now that she was a sorceress, she didn't need to do harebrained things. Her anger made her very will a reality.

Ruta’s book flew out of his grasp. He dropped into a crouch. “Who’s there?” he called again, summoning up flame with both hands and looking about wildly.

No point to _that_. The book was way ahead of him. It flew at his face, and then, purely because Rinoa was pissed off, it smacked him once on each cheek. He stumbled back. She floated the book up and, with alarming speed, dropped it on his head. It was a nice, thick proof, so she only had to do this six or seven more times to knock him out.

His flame sputtered out. Rinoa strode forward and grabbed the book, then yanked the choker off his neck.

“I’ve got you,” she told the GF inside. “I’ve got you. It’s okay. I know this is a long shot, but do you remember what happened to your master?”

She curled her will around it. That was all it took to junction: proximity and will, and the will part had started to come ridiculously easily to her after she’d absorbed Edea’s powers. So she felt the GF settle in her head next to the others. It was extremely powerful. Not as faded a presence as Alexander or Leviathan. Almost human in how bright and alive it felt.

But it didn’t answer her at first.

“What’s your name?” Rinoa said desperately, wanting answers. “Were you junctioned to Seifer Almasy? You were, weren’t you?”

_Listen_ , said a very, very familiar voice. _Get out of here first. Find some out of the way spot. Not your dad’s house, Rinoa. And then… Then we’ve gotta talk._

Rinoa dropped the book on Ruta’s head (again) in shock.


End file.
